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@RespectableLaw

There's been a lot of talk about the missionary killed by the natives of North Sentinel Island. They're probably so aggressive because of this weirdo, Maurice Vidal Portman. So here's a big thread about this creep and some facts from my decade-long obsession with the island.

Threadreader link
posted by chappell, ambrose at 10:50 PM PST - 137 comments

Wondering what to do with your earthly remains? Why not join 34,591 others and have 23 grams of your ashes baked into a clay brick and then built into a pyramid in Toxteth, Liverpool by K2 Plant Hire Ltd, also known as Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, also known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, previously (?) known as The KLF. The process is to be known as MuMufication. [more inside]
posted by deadwax at 8:47 PM PST - 34 comments

A day in the life of Lloyd Squires, Vermont's 'best' bagel maker, from Burlington Free Press. (Including a soothing 10 min. sound clip of the bakery before the morning rush)
posted by growabrain at 6:26 PM PST - 22 comments

It started innocently enough: @LeastUsedEmoji was a bot created to find out which emoji (according to Emojitracker) was least popular on Twitter. Suspension railway (🚟) ceded the spot to non-potable water (🚱) after only a day, which after 80 days itself ceded to aerial tramway (🚡). And 🚡 might have been stuck at the bottom for a long time were it not for a large group of rowdy transit-oriented teens. [more inside]
posted by solarion at 5:52 PM PST - 25 comments

Not satisfied with merely calling your employees peasants on an insurance policy? Now you can have them microchipped, just like your pets at home!
posted by eviemath at 3:37 PM PST - 45 comments

Welcome to Christmas in Hallmark Town, where romantic fates are sealed through gaslighting, sabotage and torture. (SLSalon)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:21 PM PST - 47 comments

Lightning licks guitar player and first woman to have her own record label. Jackson founded the Moon Records label in Memphis in 1956 after a few years of recording demos at Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Service and Sun Records Studio. Unable to break into the Sun Records label's stable of male artists, she received the advice and assistance of RCA Records' Chet Atkins in forming this new label to release her music. She began releasing and promoting on the label singles she recorded in her home studio, serving as engineer, producer and arranger. The artists recorded included her and a small family of early rock and roll, rockabilly, and country music performers she recruited from several Southern states. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 2:01 PM PST - 3 comments

A beautiful, beautiful short Christmas Video. In this strange time it really helped me focus on what's actually important during this time of year.
posted by JenThePro at 2:00 PM PST - 7 comments

Thanksgiving: The National Day of Mourning. "A Native student on why the holiday is a painful reminder of a whitewashed past." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 1:45 PM PST - 7 comments

A pair of electrical engineering and computer science faculty members in the Case School of Engineering have been experimenting with a new suite of sensors. This system would read not only the vibrations, sounds—and even the specific gait, or other movements—associated with people and animals in a building, but also any subtle changes in the existing ambient electrical field. "We are trying to make a building that is able to ‘listen’ to the humans inside.” The Internet of Ears. [more inside]
posted by cashman at 11:47 AM PST - 17 comments

20 Years On, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is Still Special [Kotaku] “The game begins in Kokiri Village, a training level that is also a masterstroke of simplicity. Rather than a list of instructions and commands, or dropping you in at the deep end, Ocarina begins in an eminently explorable village and tells you to explore it. There are chests to find, people to talk to, a training dungeon – it’s several hours before you even feel a need to look farther. When you do and the world opens its horizons, it is one of gaming’s great moments. Zelda games were always epic, but it was with Ocarina that they achieved a new scale: the central field seems to go for leagues, opening on to a sea, a castle, a fortress, mountains, woods, a ranch. Even the best games hadn’t presented an adventure like this before. If a modern player looks at Hyrule field now, it may seem a paltry thing. In 1998, this was the future.” [YouTube][20th Anniversary Retrospective] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:50 AM PST - 36 comments

Puberty for the Middle-Aged (SLNYT) We need to have The Talk, but for 45-year-olds. Doctors should speak to their patients about the changes that could lie ahead and how to prepare for them. And we perimenopausal women need to talk to one another, and the rest of the world, about what’s happening. Because a lot of it, to me, is really weird, really surprising and really hard to sit comfortably through, from the stray chin hair — O.K., hairs — to the decreasing bone density.
posted by bunderful at 9:08 AM PST - 110 comments

“Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable…The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.” Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972) was a militant trade unionist, socialist activist, and women’s rights leader who helped shape the New Deal despite being decried by conservative New York legislators as i‘the Red Rose of Anarchy’. Schneiderman is most famous for the bloody, 63 day long Lawrence textile Strike (which sent children away to safety in nearby Vermont.) Not for her presence, but for her “Bread and Roses speech” given earlier in the year which became a slogan and chant of the strikes (although its origin have be from popular Italian anarchist writings of the time.) James Oppenheim wrote a poem inspired by the Lawerence Strike, which was then set to music by Mimi Fariña, sister of Joan Baez, who later covered it. Other covers: Ani DiFranco - John Denver - Judy Collins - the movie Pride (Solo version by Bronwen Lewis).
posted by The Whelk at 7:51 AM PST - 7 comments

At the American Military Cemetery in Margraten, large oak trees flanked a path that wound through a sea of crosses and Stars of David. An American flag waved in the distance. Among the dead buried here are 172 African-American soldiers, killed during World War II who helped liberate the Netherlands from the Nazis in 1945. David McGhee's grandfather, Willie F. Williams, is one of them. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 7:48 AM PST - 3 comments

Scott Macaulay, of Melrose, MA, is hosting a free Thanksgiving dinner to anyone who RSVPs to his classified ad. It's his 33rd year. WaPo | alternate link [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:13 AM PST - 16 comments

How Populism Became the Concept that Defines Our Age : an article at The Guardian by Cas Mudde, part of a series on The New Populism ('An investigation into the rise of a global phenomenon'). Other pieces include: Paul Lewis et al. revealing that One in Four Europeans Vote Populist; and Matthijs Rooduijn posing the question Why is Populism All the Rage? There's also a quiz: How Populist are You?
posted by misteraitch at 4:23 AM PST - 45 comments

The History of the Oceans Is Locked in Whale Earwax.
The massive plugs contain spikes and dips of stress hormones that perfectly match the history of modern whaling.
For those of you with a more scientific disposition: Baleen whale cortisol levels reveal a physiological response to 20th century whaling.
posted by adamvasco at 4:10 AM PST - 19 comments