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The O+ Festival in San Francisco offers artists an opportunity to barter their services for dental and health treatment. "The O+ Festival in San Francisco this weekend would seem a typical indie arts event, with performances by local musicians and displays of funky art. But in a twist that highlights a longstanding problem in the creative economy, the artists involved will be paid not in cash but rather in something they may need just as badly: health care." [more inside]
posted by semaphore at 9:05 PM PST - 17 comments

In the tradition of the 1939 novel Gadsby, Toronto rapper Andrew Huang (previously) recorded a hip hop track entirely devoid of the letter E.
posted by mannequito at 6:56 PM PST - 22 comments

It's not exactly the top of many people's "Favorite Sweets" list, but there is something hypnotic about watching ribbon candy being made.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:40 PM PST - 42 comments

Sizing Up Sally Jewell " The new Interior Secretary has an impressive résumé. Oil geologist, banker, president of REI. But today's Washington is a landscape without maps, and in this age of climate change and keystone, the major battles are taking place over at the EPA and State. Is greatness still possible at Interior?" [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:14 PM PST - 13 comments

Femme fatale. Vamp. Ballerina. Consumptive. Drama queen. Nazi film star? Mummy bait. Valentino's lover. Chaplin's girl. Rival of Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. [more inside]
posted by mynameisluka at 5:42 PM PST - 12 comments

Today marks 25 years since Buran, the enigmatic Soviet Space Shuttle clone, made her single unpiloted 2-orbit flight before an inglorious retirement like her known siblings.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 5:28 PM PST - 21 comments

Shelter From The Storm – the inside story of Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 4:43 PM PST - 28 comments

Before the new movie and a new season, Season 8, the official Trailer Park Boys YouTube channel has been launched.
posted by juiceCake at 4:34 PM PST - 29 comments

Check out this rad MIT pin grid gizmo.
posted by rollick at 4:07 PM PST - 21 comments

Blood, sweat, and tears: Bodily inscriptions in contemporary experimental film
posted by namagomi at 3:14 PM PST - 1 comments

"Milk" is one of the most strange and powerful episodes to come out of the Children's Television Workshop. It is impossible to imagine this film being made now. Here's the pitch:

Yeah… Jim. Look, I thought we would show how milk gets made with no script and no dialogue. Yeah. Let's just go shoot footage of farmers and the milk truck, maybe throw in a crying baby and some weird, monotone music crafted by some composer who likes jazzy stuff played by a chamber ensemble. Sunny day? Nah. Let's not make it cheerful or happy. We should make it gloomy and unsettling. Oh, and Jim? To do it right, we need some crane shots, a huge decal for the truck, and about four and a half minutes running time.

Read on, for an interview with Robert Dennis, composer of Milk and other clips (including Cow Feeding and the Mad Painter series of shorts).
posted by filthy light thief at 2:52 PM PST - 118 comments

Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order, a novella by Carmen Maria Machado from the May/June issue of The American Reader. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 2:39 PM PST - 23 comments

"Labeling women as 'crazy' is a way of controlling them...[a] quick and easy shut-down to any discussion. Once the 'crazy' card has been pulled out, women are now put on the defensive: The onus is no longer on the man to address her concerns or her issue; it's on her to justify her behavior, to prove that she is not, in fact, crazy or irrational."
posted by rcraniac at 12:48 PM PST - 141 comments

With the holiday shopping season upon us, it might be prudent to read the terms and conditions of a sale before posting a negative review on line. Jen Palmer found this out the hard way.
posted by pjern at 12:43 PM PST - 60 comments

The Fall of the House of Moon
posted by dortmunder at 12:15 PM PST - 18 comments

Better late than never? In the editorial about President Abraham Lincoln’s speech delivered Nov. 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, the Patriot & Union failed to recognize its momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. The Patriot-News regrets the error.
posted by COD at 12:00 PM PST - 39 comments

Apparently we've been eating apples incorrectly. If each of us eats an apple a day, and we are all wasting 30 percent of our apples at $1.30 per pound, that's about $42 wasted per person per year—which is $13.2 billion annually, thrown in the trash or fed to pigs.
Taking a cue from a video entitled "How to eat an apple like a Boss", the Atlantic encourages us to be less wasteful.
posted by arcticseal at 10:31 AM PST - 162 comments

The first trailer for Noah, the forthcoming Paramount Picture biblical epic, is online. With a budget of $130 million, and slated for release in March/April 2014, and with a cast of stars, this covers Chapter 6-9 of the Book of Genesis. Filming took place mostly in Iceland, with some scenes in New York State. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 10:10 AM PST - 263 comments

La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano [2 3 4 5] is unlike anything you've heard before or will ever hear again. The notes are different from what you're used to, but what Young uses them for is... well. (If you don't have five hours to spend on a piano recital, may I suggest giving the first 4-5 minutes of disc three a go? It starts off briskly, builds to a scintillating pattern after a minute, and then, just before the three minute mark, the piano begins to roar.)
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:40 AM PST - 33 comments

Known primarily for their kitty, puppy, and owl cams, The Pet Collective has also created some entertaining music and film parodies featuring primarily cats and dogs. Among the best of their music parodies are Royals (with a very weird final scene), Wake Me Up, Thrift Shop, Roar, Wrecking Ball, and We Can’t Stop. Among the better movie parodies are Star Wars, Hunger Games, and Jaws
posted by Toekneesan at 9:35 AM PST - 10 comments

Foreign adoptions by large, evangelical families may begin happily, but patterns of neglect and dysfunction have Seattle area communities questioning their benefits. (SLSlate) [more inside]
posted by warm_planet at 8:48 AM PST - 86 comments

Once upon a time, on a now defunct site called Regretsy, there was a post about an Etsy-listed pair of "skants", priced at a mere $758(USD). Much mockery ensued, and skants became a meme of sorts, with Regretsy readers sending site owner April Winchell their own skants pictures. And now knitwear designer Stephen West has taken up the skants gauntlet by bringing us the next evolution in skants: swants. He's posted a tutorial on how to make your own swants, and a video of the Swants Dance. Swants promise to be bigger than skants ever were. Since Stephen West posted his tutorial on November 4, swants have appeared on The Today Show, on Boing Boing, and on Cosmopolitan's blog, as well as on a number of other blogs and news sites. Will you be doing the Swants Dance?
posted by orange swan at 8:14 AM PST - 52 comments

About as many people say they’ve been abducted by space aliens as say they’ve committed voter fraud One of the findings of a new working paper by John Ahlquist, Kenneth R. Mayer and Simon Jackman is that “the lower bound on the population reporting voter impersonation is nearly identical with the proportion of the population reporting abduction by extraterrestrials.” Roughly 2.5 percent of the population effectively admit to one or the other. [more inside]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:09 AM PST - 43 comments

Two days ago, as Hawaii's North Shore saw it's first swell of the winter season, Waimea Bay (one of the world's deadliest waves) was already crowded by mid-morning. Experienced San Diego surfer and recent Hawaii transplant Kirk Passmore paddled away from the crowds to the outer reef of Alligator Rock, soon after catching a relatively tame 20 footer, the final wave of his life. Though the search continues, his body has yet to be found. [more inside]
posted by BlerpityBloop at 7:52 AM PST - 12 comments

The Twitter feed for bookstore Waterstones Oxford Street, long known to fans of surreal twitter lit, reaches new heights of Fame with a Buzzfeed compilation. Browse around its Storify for science fiction, thrilling action/adventure, and poignant short stories.
posted by Erasmouse at 6:52 AM PST - 14 comments

Last week, Time magazine put out a feature on the Gods of Food, a series of articles on 60-some-odd empire-building chefs who the magazine thinks are influencing and leading cuisine today. Beyond the statistical problems with the article ... some folks had the temerity to point out that this culinary Mount Olympus was basically a bunch of white dudes. Actually it was all dudes, not a single woman deified. Eater's interview with Time's food editor Howard Chua-Eoan about the story. Amanda Cohen's scathing takedown of the clusterfuck. The New York Times' Room for Debate feature asking leading female chefs about underrepresented women in food media. Eater's latest piece on the question of gender bias in food journalism. [via]
posted by Room 641-A at 6:26 AM PST - 61 comments

'I can't sleep comfortably anymore, because she requires the exact center of the bed, meaning I have anywhere between 1-3 limbs dangling off the edge of the bed. Sometimes while she sleeps, in order to make myself feel better, I whisper to her, "I saved your life, I can take it away."' [more inside]
posted by billiebee at 5:53 AM PST - 62 comments

"what would i say?" automatically generates Facebook posts that sound like you! Technically speaking, it trains a Markov Bot based on mixture model of bigram and unigram probabilities derived from your past post history. Don't worry, we don't store any of your personal information anywhere. In fact, we don't even have a database! All computations are done client side, so only your browser ever sees your post history.

The results are often hilarious (and sometimes nonsensical) -- it all depends on what you've written on Facebook.

posted by Blasdelb at 5:27 AM PST - 252 comments

The Most Epic of Splits is a Volvo commercial featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and contains no computer editing or trickery. Behind the Scenes. The commercial is one of a series of new advertisements for Volvo Trucks.
posted by blue_beetle at 4:22 AM PST - 60 comments