January 2, 2014

Raise Your Ears & Hold On To Your Heart

Raise Your Ears & Hold On To Your Heart is a documentary about the recording of The Polyphonic Spree's 2007 album, The Fragile Army. Available to watch on YouTube in eight parts:
Intro & Preproduction [7m9s] Packing Up & Pachyderm Studios [4m30s] Resurrection At Pachyderm Studios [7m43s] Spaceway Studios [2m6s] Choir At Electrical Audio [9m28s] Symphonic & Percussion At Maximedia [8m3s] Lead Vocal At Maximedia, Vibes/Percussion At The Triplex [5m52s] Closing & End Credits [7m3s] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:09 PM PST - 4 comments

Live classical concerts via online radio

World Concert Hall publishes a schedule, seven days out, of live classical concerts and operas scheduled for streaming broadcast on the web.
posted by Orinda at 5:34 PM PST - 11 comments

The needle and the homage done

Artist Jo Hamilton makes weird and fun portraits with yarn.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:20 PM PST - 12 comments

1 weird old trick that will make you 100s of $millions

Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet. How one of the most notorious alleged hustlers in the history of e-commerce made a fortune on the Web.
posted by gottabefunky at 2:28 PM PST - 55 comments

...and her name is Arabella Bianculli-Jakande

The Liberal Gun Club, memorably described in a recent San Francisco Chronicle profile as "the NPR of gun clubs", is an alternative to the National Rifle Association (NRA) for people who don't share the NRA's politics.
posted by scrump at 2:19 PM PST - 343 comments

2013: Year of the Big Fine

Do big fines actually prompt corporations to mend their ways? Or is it just the cost of doing business? (SLNYT+video) (previously/similarly)
posted by Obscure Reference at 1:38 PM PST - 54 comments

"No negative thoughts, he told himself. Stay positive. Stay strong."

A Speck in the Sea [NYTimes.com]: John Aldridge fell overboard in the middle of the night, 40 miles from shore, and the Coast Guard was looking in the wrong place.
posted by Fizz at 1:15 PM PST - 28 comments

A Cabinet of Curiousities

Triumph of the Strange
Is curiosity, however, even a coherent concept? What, if anything, unites the walrus and the Rolodex? According to Dillon and Warner, curiosity is lustful and avaricious, yet as playful as Alice in Wonderland. It distracts itself by flirting with astonishment yet is driven to exacting inspection. It loves secrecy and enigma yet is insatiably questioning and bent on decipherment. It adores intricacy and ingenuity, only to find how evanescent, incommunicable, and random they can be. It's harmless fun and has "an innocent eye"—a central theme, suggested by the Hayward Gallery curator Roger Malbert—yet leads to dangerous revelations. Or maybe it makes dangerous revelations because of this innocence: It follows its own hunches because it doesn't see where they lead. Think of the character Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet: "I'm seeing something that was always hidden."
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:08 PM PST - 6 comments

"Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility."

Slate visits the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland (Official museum website).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:37 PM PST - 17 comments

What Monkeys Eat: A Few Thoughts About Pop Culture Writing

If you think monkeys are fascinating and you want to understand and be of value to them, it's not enough to be an expert on what monkeys should ideally eat. You have to understand what monkeys actually eat.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:15 PM PST - 30 comments

"I'd buy that for a dollar!" RIP

Requiem for a Twitter Bot - Bixby Snyder bot is no more.
posted by Artw at 10:52 AM PST - 18 comments

The Hodge-Podge Transformer

They told me this was the Transformer. The Hodge-Podge Transformer, en route to the Ossuary. I don't understand what any of that means. I wish I could go to the Ossuary. The place of bones. That sounds simple and quiet, unlike this terrible place. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 10:45 AM PST - 5 comments

I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot

"Hello. My name is Chris Kluwe, and for eight years I was the punter for the Minnesota Vikings. In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team. At the time, quite a few people asked me if I thought it was because of my recent activism for same-sex marriage rights, and I was very careful in how I answered the question." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:25 AM PST - 247 comments

There's no such thing as cruelty free cocaine

'I submit that the drug trade—and specifically cocaine—is among the worst things that the human mind ever invented.' The gruesome human cost of a fun little party treat.
posted by nerdfish at 10:23 AM PST - 144 comments

Violent Thrillers About Cats for Ages 8 to 10

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s? ... Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:52 AM PST - 63 comments

Numismatic bassorilievo

Spanish artist mrthe creates hobo nickles, bas relief sculptures carved into coins that take advantage of the multiple layers of metals from cladding. See more of them here, and read up on the history of hobo nickels. (via, previously)
posted by slogger at 9:31 AM PST - 6 comments

"It was like a 13-week family reunion."

"Basically what Dan is doing is re-grounding the characters, who last year kind of got out of hand. I've said this about the series, that it's like an Edgar Wright movie in a way. All the characters in Shaun of the Dead were very grounded and normal, no one was a caricature of anything. But there's a zombie apocalypse happening outside. That's how I see Community — we have to deal with real stuff, like the loss of Pierce, in a bizarre world." Joel McHale discusses the fifth season of Community, which premieres tonight with creator and once-fired show runner Dan Harmon back in control. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 7:43 AM PST - 183 comments

Big living public hair

A fluffy ball of hair turns out to be lots of spider-things SLV
posted by angrycat at 5:20 AM PST - 114 comments

Welcome to the dark playground

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate, How to Beat Procrastination
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:44 AM PST - 131 comments

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