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cementing the link between beer and creativity cementing the link between beer and creativity, a group of actual grown-ups manage to make music together utilizing only their breath and beer bottles.
posted by TMezz at 11:32 PM PST - 12 comments

could the holidays get any better! Two new Simon's Cat videos!
posted by HuronBob at 8:29 PM PST - 23 comments

Short, animated Russian battles to the death: Pacman vs Mario, general vs zombie, ninja vs crusader, accountant vs designer, Clara Roft vs Louisiana Jones and many, many more. (via oink)
posted by madamjujujive at 7:45 PM PST - 28 comments

One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick Inspired by Zak Smith's (previously) Illustrations for Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow, self-taught artist Matt Kish is posting One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick. Some favourites: 8, 40, 48, 54, 66, 74, and 85. While he's only through about 100 of the Signet Edition's 552 pages, you can follow along on the artist's blog.
posted by synecdoche at 5:12 PM PST - 29 comments

An eerie tribute to countless Twilight Zone episodes, Pixar Animator Rodrigo Blaas has published his animated short film Alma. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 4:07 PM PST - 73 comments

Do plants have a consciousness? Michael Pollan seemed to argue they do in The Botony of Desire (original book) and that they were inextricably involved in co-evolution with their human cultivators, affecting human development, perhaps as much as the humans who are selectively choosing traits in plants. If that’s true, that plants are conscious, is it okay to eat them?
posted by Toekneesan at 3:53 PM PST - 99 comments

Lynsey G. has taken odd writing jobs where she could get them for a few years now, and one day woke up to realize that they were all about sex. [more inside]
posted by minifigs at 3:51 PM PST - 17 comments

Sure, we all know that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is broadcast every year in the US as a Christmas tradition, and that Sweden basically closes every year from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. on December 24th to watch Donald Duck, but what about other countries? [more inside]
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:42 PM PST - 33 comments

Gertrude Bass Warner Lantern Slides::Rice Festival::Japanese Child::Sumo::Bride and Groom::Dressing Hair::Tengu Dancing
posted by vronsky at 3:40 PM PST - 9 comments

On a Friday in the waning months of the 20th century, a Macromedia employee was getting ready to meet with the creator of Beavis & Butthead the next Monday to demonstrate Flash v.4's new feature, synchronized audio tracks – a feature he needed to learn over the weekend. So he put together the simplest model he could: a floating skull sans lips, tongue or physique. The meeting was postponed, so the employee continued to spitshine the animation and put it on his website. His friends e-mailed their friends, and soon, everyone met a heavy-metal animated floating skull demon and his adorable little devil pal. Sparks had created Radiskull, who will kill you one by one. (Atom) [more inside]
posted by MikeHarris at 3:39 PM PST - 38 comments

For many, this time of year brings to mind George Frideric Handel's masterpiece "Messiah" - a three part oratorio for orchestra, chorus and soloists. For many, the holiday season has not begun until the local Messiah Sing-Along. (Need a score to sing along? It's always a good idea to check the Choral Public Domain Library! And before you go, make sure you're ready with a handy - and hilarious - quiz!) But the Messiah narrative has much less to do with that omnipresent, tacit, eponymous character and much more to do with the shared and often painful condition of the human family and our attempts to understand and commune with the universe. Director Claus Guth has staged the oratorio using a setting that mirrors that experience: a funeral. [Clips of that performance within.] [more inside]
posted by greekphilosophy at 2:44 PM PST - 19 comments

In a first for Latin America, Mexico City's legislature voted to legalize gay marriage Monday night, changing "the city's civil code definition of marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the 'free uniting of two people.'" [more inside]
posted by SpringAquifer at 1:31 PM PST - 51 comments

ITP just had their winter show here’s a random sample of the works the students produced: Scratch & Sniff Screen by Alex Kauffmann. Collaborative storytelling from Daniel Tsadok and Eun Joo Lee in the form of Exquisite Corpse Drawing. Whisper Deck a new way of interacting with search from Craig Kapp. Face Fight, a fight with faces and joysticks from Greg Borenstein. Mental Block from Arturo Vidich, Eric Mika, Sofy Yuditskaya, which is an exploration of attention, mindfulness, and communication using dust shields and polarized lenses. VJing, not that kind, from Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford. Current is a visualization of search and reporting trends(cooler and prettier than it sounds) from Zoe Fraade Blanar.
posted by edbles at 1:28 PM PST - 6 comments

Arnold Stang has passed away at the age of 91. While best known as a movie 'milquetoast' (co-owner of the gas station Jonathan Winters destroys in "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World"; sidekick to 'Arnold Strong' in "Hercules in New York"), he was also a cartoon voice actor who was the pugnacious mouse 'Cousin Hoiman' in in the repetitive "Herman & Catnip" toons and the alley-cat-con-man "Top Cat" (channeling Phil Silvers).
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:09 PM PST - 20 comments

From Juan Cole: Informed Comment "Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade; Or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs".
posted by adamvasco at 12:58 PM PST - 24 comments

Ann Nixon Cooper has died at the age of 107. She came to great recognition after being highlighted at the age of 106 after casting her vote in Atlanta for Barack Obama and then being mentioned in President Obama's victory speech regarding the changes she had seen in her lifetime. Here she is remembered by Karen Grisby Bates, who helped write Cooper's memoir, A Century and Some Change: My Life Before the President Called My Name, which will be released in January.
posted by questionsandanchors at 12:01 PM PST - 16 comments

Confederate soldier Richard Kirkland is known as the "Angel of Marye's Heights" for venturing in between the opposing army's lines to give water to his wounded foes. The Union soldiers were mowed down the previous day in a series of futile attacks against the Confederate positions. The story fits in with the narrative of post-war reconciliation and reunion and offers an inspiring tale of humanity amid the carnage of war. There is a statue at the Fredericksburg battlefield and a movie in the works.

But did it really happen? One writer takes a look at the records, and it doesn't seem likely. [more inside]
posted by marxchivist at 11:42 AM PST - 22 comments

The Neuroscience of Screwing Up by Jonah Lehrer [more inside]
posted by AceRock at 11:28 AM PST - 16 comments

Overambitious eating: Tetrapod Zoology brings us a series of articles on overambitious gluttony by animals. seagull vs phone, small army, doll parts, a perentie trying for a spiky echidna, heron vs. lamprey, roadrunner vs. horned lizard, snake vs. centipede, and real lizard vs. plasic lizard. [more inside]
posted by jonesor at 11:26 AM PST - 13 comments

Sweden's bizarre tradition of watching Donald Duck (Kalle Anka) cartoons on Christmas Eve
posted by mr.marx at 11:13 AM PST - 51 comments

Christmas Mini Room Escape Game III. A light-hearted diversion from the work that you're ignoring this week anyway. [more inside]
posted by ixohoxi at 10:43 AM PST - 34 comments

Kim Peek, who inspired the title character in the film Rain Man, has died.
posted by h0p3y at 9:27 AM PST - 33 comments

Peacay of BibliOdyessey highlights some stunning examples of Victorian Infographics from the Rumsey Map Collection(previously). (Direct Flickr link)
posted by The Whelk at 9:26 AM PST - 21 comments

The Silver Thief: The Story of a Burglar Who Was Too Good for His Own Good: The story of Blane Nordahl, an eminent silver thief in New Jersey and the hunt for him.
posted by reenum at 9:20 AM PST - 28 comments

Ten Ways to Travel in Deep Space from New Scientist. [more inside]
posted by blue_beetle at 8:31 AM PST - 48 comments

Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus: I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance ... was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them.” Two of the books, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Flaubert’s Letters (numbers 15, 40), were written in the twentieth century, most in the past thirty years. And all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality. There’s not a dull read in the group. [more inside]
posted by geoff. at 7:14 AM PST - 51 comments

An eccentric Chinese entrepreneur built the world's second largest shopping mall in a rural area with no airport and no freeway. Today, that mall stands almost completely empty. [more inside]
posted by shii at 7:14 AM PST - 43 comments

Duke Nukem Forever is officialy dead, here's why

"when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist."

[more inside]
posted by askmehow at 6:56 AM PST - 99 comments

"Think of it - a piece knitted before the turn of the last century, designed by a close group of family/friends living in an isolated area, preserved in a photograph, being recreated by a far-flung band brought together by technology and a love of this craft." Presenting the Queen Susan Shawl knitting pattern, a Shetland shawl painstakingly reconstructed following an innocent post on a (members-only) message board. Here's the story.
posted by liet at 6:53 AM PST - 27 comments

China's last tiger... has been eaten. [more inside]
posted by orthogonality at 5:49 AM PST - 52 comments

For television stations around the world, December is the season of the Christmas tape. Unlike ordinary blooper reels, Christmas tapes (also known as goof tapes) are produced as entertainment for the staff Christmas party, with the intention that they will never be seen by the general public. Tropes of the genre include cruel practical jokes, after-hours misuse of the studio's green screen, in-jokes about unreliable equipment, sarcastic assessments of colleagues' work habits, and the usual piece-to-camera screwups. The B-B-C's tradition of in-house production, however, has ensured that its Christmas tapes contain such oddities as indecent daleks, Nazi weather presenters and on one occasion, a rather bad sci-fi film. Most links mildly NSFW.
posted by embrangled at 5:10 AM PST - 9 comments

Keeping America's Edge (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:01 AM PST - 21 comments

Star Wars Weather
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:20 AM PST - 22 comments