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The Virtual Booktour, brainchild of Kevin Smokler, is currently touring Screening Party, by Denis Hensley.
Stop by and see where the tour goes next!
posted by tomcosgrave at 3:39 PM PST - 1 comments

This weekend the Chinati foundation will be hosting its annual open house in Marfa, Texas. This year the guest artist will be Claes Oldenburg who will be giving lectures on his work and his processes. The Chinati foundation was founded by artist Donald Judd when he decided to move to the wilds of West Texas and enjoy the open expanse of anti-civilization. At the foundation you can enjoy Judd's 100 steel boxes or peruse permanent installations by minimalist Dan Flavin or John Chamberlain. The foundation has created quite a stir, and this year should be no different. This once dying town has been revived through art and one man's vision.
posted by Benway at 3:18 PM PST - 7 comments

The Best-Kept Data-Superpower Secret on the Web RootsWeb is one of the older sites on the Net, and has one of the densest data collections, but it gets very few props. Almost all of the (we're talking terabytes here) data is a.) free; b.) user-contributed. It was open-source and public domain when Linus Torvalds, bless his soul, was still muddling through high school. Sugar-daddy site Ancestry.com does a lot of advertising, but you hardly ever heard about homely, brilliant RootsWeb. RootsWeb hosts many of sites that make up the WorldGenWeb Project, a loose network of genealogical and historical data repositories organized by locality, from the AfghanistanGenWeb through the USGenWeb all the way to the ZimbabweGenWeb. Rootsweb's Social Security Death Index UI is excellent--use it to search for a record amongst 70 million available. The WorldConnect database offers up the family trees of 298,212,965 people. Remember the domain, because after this when you Google, you'll be impressed (I believe) by how many content-heavy sites are hosted by RootsWeb. Any other RootsWeb-hosted sites that MeFites enjoy?
posted by jengod at 2:57 PM PST - 12 comments

The Computer History Museum is hosting this years Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, California. Featuring live demonstatrions of a Xerox Alto as well as an auction for a Commodore 64 prototype, this year promises to be fun for geeks of all ages. (via Wired)
posted by starscream at 1:59 PM PST - 5 comments

Scott County, Iowa A very informative website about Scott County, Iowa. Including, but not limited to, Meet Meet Your Motor Grader Operator and Scott County's most wanted.
posted by lazy-ville at 1:40 PM PST - 10 comments

Virus replication is a feature! "If you are using a Macintosh e-mail program that is not from Microsoft, we recommend checking with that particular company. But most likely other e-mail programs like Eudora are not designed to enable virus replication." The original URL is 404. I wonder if Microsoft will be exerting their copyrights to force archive.org to remove this.
posted by tbc at 1:17 PM PST - 3 comments

If you've bought one of BMG's new copy-protected CDs, remember to hold down the shift key while loading it into your PC. That one keystorke will let you be free to rip, mix, and burn it.
posted by mathowie at 12:49 PM PST - 38 comments

The 5pm Deadline is approaching, but the White House doesn't care. The White House--expected to turn in all documents relevant to the Justice Department investigation of the Plame affair--has instead decided that a team of lawyers ought to spend two weeks determining which evidence can be used against their clients. Meanwhile, President Bush continues his two-month initiative to get to the bottom of the matter himself.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 12:43 PM PST - 21 comments

You've laughed at them in the supermarket checkout line, now dirt Magazine lets you create your own tabloid headlines and spread vile gossip about your friends and enemies with a few keystrokes and a simple click of the mouse!
posted by MrBaliHai at 12:08 PM PST - 11 comments

Toronto in 14 hours, by Sam Javanrouh, who owns the number one Canadian photoblog: Daily Dose of Imagery
posted by hoder at 11:54 AM PST - 11 comments

Only 10 days left - Free house and internet cafe business in Alaska all you have to do is write an essay. Well, not an essay, but a story, poem, or limerick. It is tempting. But the entry fee is slowing me down. Stupid gimmick? Nifty idea?
posted by yesster at 11:11 AM PST - 19 comments

Need an Idiom? Check out The Idiom Connection. Think certain phrases are such cliches that they should be banned? Before you condemn or mock them, take a moment to learn more about the origin of some of these phrases.
::via The Tower of English::
posted by anastasiav at 10:57 AM PST - 8 comments

One of my favorite poets is Denise Duhamel, whom I met at a writer's workshop back in '94. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised to find the entire text of her first book, Smile! online.
posted by hyperizer at 9:02 AM PST - 3 comments

We can know more than we can tell. Consider The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Knowledge and Intuition Website has one take on Polanyi's concept of tacit knowing. Karl Erik Sveiby also has an interesting page in Tacit Knowledge and provides you the opportunity to Test Your Tacit Knowledge. Tacit knowledge and Implicit learning provides yet another view. I don't pretend to understand much of this and yet I feel the concept has merit--ah, as Wittgenstein observed, Of that of which we can not speak, we must be silent.
If you know what I mean... *rolls eyes*
posted by y2karl at 8:59 AM PST - 13 comments

Crap from the Past is a radio show with a nice song archive much in the spirit of April Winchell's (admittedly larger and better quality) sound collection. More David Hasselhoff, the original Mahna Mahna song and a lot of other crap!
posted by ikalliom at 8:47 AM PST - 5 comments

Lester Bangs, rock critic. Some reviews to read and enjoy. Patti Smith. Astral Weeks. Captain Beefheart. The Shaggs. Black Sabbath. Weather Report. Lou Reed. There are books you can read about him, too. (Previous mention in this thread.)
posted by ashbury at 7:32 AM PST - 18 comments

Cold enough yet to warm yourself by a fire? Why not add some interesting color to the flames? Chemicals to make a fire with blue, red, green, and other-colored flames are readily available, and there are a variety of methods to get the ingredients into the fire. You can also buy ready-made stones and sprinkles if you're not much of a home chemist.
posted by beth at 7:14 AM PST - 5 comments

Official Bush-Cheney '04 Blog Now Online, will offer breaking news, grassroots updates, and posts from the campaign leadership.
posted by dagny at 7:12 AM PST - 56 comments

IgNobel 2003 Prize Ceremony. [Real Player Video 1:35:43] Waste your morning listening to the Ignitaries giving their nano lectures.
posted by srboisvert at 7:05 AM PST - 1 comments

Alphabet Evolution
See the evolutionary progression of alphabets through time and cultures. Examples include Cuneiform, Phoenician, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, modern Cyrillic and the Latin character sets. The Latin is the best documented character set and requires a wide screen to see all the evolutionary events (especially Y and Z)
posted by Irontom at 5:44 AM PST - 9 comments

Foamy the Squirrel's long and funny rant. Here's a (Save-target-as) link if you prefer.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 5:03 AM PST - 16 comments

Might as well jump. JUMP! An interesting article (nicked from linkfilter) about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. Only 26 people are known to have survived the 220 ft drop into water 350ft deep. I have been across the bridge once and was "amused" by the fact that there is a free counselling phone as you get halfway across. Reading this article and realising the numbers involved, it suddenly seems less funny... BTW, the jumper (who before he went a second time was one of the 26) protesting the Iraq War was discussed here.
posted by jontyjago at 3:11 AM PST - 38 comments

Fragment: a writing meme. For creative writers who might need a small nudge in the ribs, three sentence fragments posted once a week "for you to fit into a bit of fiction/stream of consciousness/what-have-you... a quick bit of dirtiness to get your creative energy flowing". Write your bit and post your link. (via the ever-enlightening Anne, of Fishbucket.)
posted by taz at 2:07 AM PST - 5 comments