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Feds want Google search records according to Mercury News. John Batelle has some analysis as well. This isn't looking too good. Google promises to fight it, but even if they do, does a loss still hurt them the same amount?
posted by rhyax at 10:53 PM PST - 53 comments

Listen to the Many Moods of the Manatee: annoyed, frightened, hungry, and flatulent.
posted by ottereroticist at 10:06 PM PST - 21 comments

Vern Fonk wants to sell you insurance. Seattlites have been enjoying his quirky late night TV advertisements for years. This latest one had me spitting chardonnay out my nose [embedded video].
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:47 PM PST - 36 comments

What Would Tyler Durden Do is the latest home for Brendon, the one time head writer over at celebrity gossip sites thesuperficial.com & idontlikeyouinthatway.com (while his writing remains sharp & inventive, the domain names of the sites he writes for are getting longer & less original with each move). The usual content (updated several times daily) involves photographic embarassing invasions of celebrity privacy and absurdist writing.

Oh, I almost forgot - for the undoubtedly small percentage of the reading audience interested in watching Colin Farrel have sex with a playboy playmate, a digital copy of the illegal tape stolen from Farrel's house is the lead post on wwtdd.com currently.
posted by jonson at 9:44 PM PST - 36 comments

T'aint the House and t'aint the Senate, it's really kinda in between.
posted by homunculus at 7:17 PM PST - 46 comments

Happy Birthday. Trogdor is 3 today.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 5:40 PM PST - 48 comments

Korea to unveil Police Robots in 5 years. This project is being spearheaded by KAIST. Whom the team at engadget visited early last year. Some of KAIST's earlier robots, Ahra and Maru.
posted by sourbrew at 5:23 PM PST - 27 comments

The conference at Wannsee occurred on January 20, 1942.
The Holocaust had been going on for at least one year; the camp at Dachau had been in operation for several years. The Final Solution was already underway. At issue at Wannsee, in the relaxed and distinctively upper middle-class atmosphere of that SS guest-house for the fifteen highly placed Nazis was the best strategy for genocide. Less than one year after the conference a little girl who had been hiding in Holland is sent to the Bergen camp in northern Germany. She spends more than six years looking for four perfect pebbles
posted by Smedleyman at 5:13 PM PST - 16 comments

The Monster at the end of this e-Book. Grover, it turns out, is among the best of the web. And since we're already here, little Robert's and Haley's reimaginings via "Kay's Home Page" (Grover lesson plan included).
posted by nobody at 3:54 PM PST - 53 comments

The 100 Best Companies to Work For. The Top Ten starting with #1: Genentech, Wegmans, Valero Energy, Griffin Hospital, W.L. Gore, Container Store, Vision Service Plan, J.M. Smucker, REI, S.C. Johnson & Son. But The Complete List has some surprises. It puts Microsoft at #42 behind Starbucks at #29. (Starbucks pays $500 towards tuition to part-timers who work there for more than a year). By clicking on the company links on the List you get stats on employee salaries, turnover, minority hiring etc, learning for instance, that the most common job at Microsoft pays $107,000/year.
posted by storybored at 3:36 PM PST - 53 comments

If you're into that sort of thing, I guess, more (male) facial hair than you can shake a stick at. [other MeFi reading material while your barber strops...]
posted by Rothko at 2:59 PM PST - 25 comments

THE ORIGINAL GAY REPUBLICANS A homosexual prostitution ring was under investigation by federal and district authorities that included among its clients Key officials of the reagan and Bush (senior) officials. The story received some newspaper coverage but there was a TV News Media blackout on the subject. For this reason, most Americans have never heard of it. Former republican Senator John Decamp was involved in the production a documentary about called "Conspiracy of Silence".
posted by sundaymag at 2:55 PM PST - 56 comments

The Anti-Cute "Oh it is mother fucking on. Round up the troops. Arm yourselves. It's time to show your loyalty to JALG and fight for once in your puny little life goddamnit. Some very popular blogs which shall remain nameless(boingboing and metafilter) have recently posted to some bullshit cute "animal" blog. I'm not going to embarass anybody here by telling you what this bullshit blog is. It's cuteoverload [previously], more like overload of bull." Compare and contrast with the ultimate in cute.
posted by ereshkigal45 at 1:50 PM PST - 45 comments

Townes van Zandt. In some theaters now is a new documentary about his life called Be Here to Love Me--a life that followed the all-too-typical path of a star that burns too bright: the promise of talent, addiction, and untimely death. (see the trailer here or here). Townes van Zandt was a singer/songwriter, often included in the folk or country genres, whose biggest accomplishment was when Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard took his song Poncho and Lefty to the top of the charts. But even though he never was famous, he has achieved legendary status. Steve Earle once said "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."
posted by dios at 1:18 PM PST - 41 comments

Are Conservative Republicans Now America's Permanent Ruling Class?
posted by The Jesse Helms at 12:37 PM PST - 61 comments

We don't not make deals with terrorists. Yesterday, the Guardian reported: "Kidnappers threatened to kill the abducted US journalist Jill Carroll unless the Bush administration ordered the release of Iraqi women prisoners within 72 hours, according to a report on al-Jazeera television yesterday." Today, the BBC reports "Iraq's ministry of justice has told the BBC that six of the eight women being held by coalition forces in Iraq have been released early. The six were freed because there was insufficient evidence to charge them, a justice ministry spokesman said." Cause, meet effect. Effect, this is cause.
posted by insomnia_lj at 12:33 PM PST - 48 comments

The Niagara Fortissimo. “Mahler was to conduct in Buffalo, New York, and we took advantage of the trip to visit Niagara Falls. We spent hours near and even under the roaring falls... and then with that roar still in his ears Mahler went to conduct Beethoven’s ‘Pastorale’. I was waiting for him as he stepped off the podium. ‘Endlich ein fortissimo!,’ he said, ‘At last a fortissimo!’” The fortissimo in question is Beethoven's, not Niagara's. The point, as Alma elaborates it in her memoirs, is that music can offer experiences more overpowering than Nature itself — a kind of extreme aestheticism that Oscar Wilde also propounded in "The Decay of Lying" when he said that most sunsets are attempts at second-rate Turners. More inside.
posted by matteo at 12:15 PM PST - 8 comments

"Radical" UCLA professors targeted by alumni group.
An alumni group is offering students up to $100 per class to supply tapes and notes exposing University of California, Los Angeles professors who allegedly express extreme left-wing political views.
posted by ericb at 11:30 AM PST - 72 comments

Bruce Haack Grandfather of Techno. "Bruce was always somewhat prophetic in his works and in predictions to friends - he once described a future age in which all music would be shared by everyone..."

MP3.com samples. Wikipedia. Incomplete discography. Weird interview. And the video documentary, Bruce Haack: King of Techno. (Warning: Flash, audio.)
posted by loquacious at 10:52 AM PST - 22 comments

If you can't be there in person, at least you can read the blogs of those lucky attendees. Share your preferred Sundance news sources here and/or by del.icio.us tag. If you are attending for the first time, you'll want to read the Virgin's Guide. Some think "Sundance shows too many "indie" films that are loaded with well-established talent in front of and behind the camera and ample budgets. It's not the place to go for new opportunities much anymore". (comment on page) See also: This year's titles sorted for your convenience.
posted by spock at 10:37 AM PST - 12 comments

The Supreme Court decided Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood today, vacating the lower court's ruling that the parental notification statute was unconstitional. Instead, the Court instructed the lower court to consider narrower relief. The Court, in an opinion [pdf] written by Justice O'Connor, held that if enforcing a statute that regulates access to abortion would be unconstitutional in medical emergencies, invalidating the statute entirely is not always necessary or justified, for lower courts may be able to render narrower declaratory and injunctive relief. [more inside]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:06 AM PST - 33 comments

Minor Tweaks. No biggie, it's just some guy's little blog, with some hit-or-miss funny stuff and a few running features that are vaguely reminiscent of McSweeney's. The Ikea Dialogues and the Coke Dialogue are worth a chuckle. Note: Anna and Hank really do talk like that; I encourage you to go and harrass them (click "Ask Anna") yourselves. Start by asking if they're married, and take it from there.
posted by Gator at 9:00 AM PST - 20 comments

Ancient rice festival has reputation smeared by 'therapeutic' facial cream claims. [link SFW]
A Fukuoka festival dating back to ancient times is growing increasingly popular with Japan's adult movie fans because it involves smearing gooey, white liquid all over the faces of participants.
posted by PenguinBukkake at 8:26 AM PST - 15 comments

Corporate Interest Plot to Overthrow US Government. Approximately 72-years ago, the predecessor to the House Un-American Affairs Committee, known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, investigated claims made by Marine Corps General Smedley Butler that a vast right-wing conspiracy funded by the American Liberty League (Wiki) (funded by US Steel, Goodyear, DuPont, Morgan-Stanley, Chase-Manhattan, Remington Arms, and others) with backing from some of America's wealthiest citizens (such as Al Smith and Irene DuPont) and various Wall Street interests (1930s American Business seemed to be pro-fascism as a hedge against communists and socialists to protect their own wealth in the face of the Great Depression).  Their goal was to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install a military dictatorship in order to stop FDR's New Deal and its "redistribution of wealth" and to enact fascist policies to protect the economy and their investments. [more inside]
posted by rzklkng at 7:17 AM PST - 51 comments

Medblogfilter: medGadget has announced the winners of the 2005 Medical Weblog Awards. (more inside)
posted by slimepuppy at 7:10 AM PST - 3 comments

First draft of 'On the Road' arrives in San Francisco. With pic of Jami and Carolyn Cassady viewing the scroll.
posted by xowie at 7:05 AM PST - 24 comments

Ever since the Million Dollar Homepage, the web world's advertisers and quick buckateers have gone PixelAdvertising mad. Buy building bricks and fill a room, buy desktop icons and buy even more pixels. Now roofs are the next target (literally) - where will it end?

I would offer adspace on my head, but that's already been done to death. Whatever's next? I can turn the internet off, but its starting to look like I'll have to pull the blind down next time I fly.
posted by RhidianJ at 6:06 AM PST - 36 comments

Near Ovulation, Your Cheatin' Heart Will Tell on You "New research from UCLA and the University of New Mexico suggests that members of "the gentler sex" may have evolved to cheat on their mates during the most fertile part of their cycle — but only when those mates are less sexually attractive than other men."
posted by anyokerin at 2:56 AM PST - 57 comments