March 29, 2012
Literature
The top 25 American writers, as determined by the amount of scholarship on them. Literary flowchart by Jimmy Chen.
Manuscript Found On The Coast Of Yucatan
What a beautiful mind you have.
something about bells, balls and bulls
“Vermin!” “Abortion!” “Sewer-rat!” “Crritic!”
A Large & Startling Figure
"How do you like your blue eyed boy, Mr. Death?" Harry Crews has died at the age of 76. He was an author, a teacher, a boxer, a raconteur. But mostly, he was a writer.
The Miracle of Facial Transplant Surgery
Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez is one of the world's foremost facial transplant surgeons. He and his team performed a 36 hour facial transplant surgery, the most extensive one to date, on a man who lost his face in a gun accident 15 years ago. The transplant included a donor tongue and set of teeth.
In honor of the advancements modern medicine has made in facial transplant surgery, CBS News recently ran a gallery of facial transplant recipients. (Warning: disturbing, yet hopeful, images inside.)
Flying Low
Josef Hoflehner took a series of black & white wide-angle shots of planes that appear to be flying very close to the beach. [Previously]
Moan about the present, venerate the past.
Amazing Paper Sculptures. Brooklyn based artist Lauren Clay "creates these three-dimensional sculptures out of papier-mâché and painted cut paper (among many other things) that go far beyond the limits of paper’s two-dimensionality."
'On contaminated dives, they get an extra $10 per day'
Swimming on the Hot Side: An elite team of nuclear divers are risking their lives to help save a troubled industry.
The Life of a Nuclear Diver
Pour one out for the penny
5 years after a think tank study (PDF) recommended its retirement, Canada says goodbye to the penny.
Previous penny pinching 1 2
A Woman's Story
To the ocean, Alice!
"NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore." An undersea expendition funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has discovered the spent rocket engines used to power Apollo 11.
Good thing he didn't hack that box open with a carpet knife!
In 2007, a 15th-century illuminated manuscript returned to the George Peabody Library in Baltimore after going missing over 40 years ago. [more inside]
Physical violence is the least of my priorities.
Ritualized vomiting was simply part of brotherly life.
I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks... among other abuses.A sobering look into the world of Dartmouth College's fraternities. Single page view.
It's the Pleats.
Ron Burgundy will return to the big screen. During Conan O'Brien's show on Wednesday night, Will Ferrell announced in character that a sequel to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is happening. [more inside]
No man is an island
Eke out a peaceful life in the wilderness in Make No Wonder, a new HTML5 game by MeFi's own Matthew Hollett.
[via mefi projects]
Pretty Pony DEATH BLASTER
The Enduring Consequences of Unemployment
The Enduring Consequences of Unemployment. It is perhaps no surprise that "....workers who lost jobs during the recession of the early 1980s were making 20 percent less than their peers two decades later." Or that unemployment is also bad for your health.... "lA worker laid off at age 40 could expect to die at least a year sooner than his peers." What frames the issue starkly though is that unemployed people gradually lost the ability to read. [more inside]
The next night we ate whale
Go to bed, Tao Lin. Cole Styker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan's Army Conquered the Web interviews and considers Tao Lin and 'trollgaze'. [more inside]
Thomas Zwijsen performs Nylon Maiden
“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive has gone live. The archive organizes Mandela’s papers chronologically and thematically. You can jump into sections covering his Early Life, Prison Years, and Presidential Years, or explore his extensive book collections and work with youngsters or see his first recorded interview from 1961. (via)
This isn't Amelia Earhart or the Bermuda Triangle we're talking about here...
And yet, we don't know exactly when the game came out. In fact, talk to enough people and you'll come to find out that we can't even agree on the year...Sad But True: We Can't Prove When Super Mario Bros. Came Out
Everything Must Go!
I get up in the morning and ask: What if?
"I get up every morning at 5, go for a half-hour walk in the desert, come home and have a cup of coffee, sit down at the desk and ask myself what I would say if I were him, and what I would do if I were her. I think curiosity is actually a moral virtue. I think a person who is curious is slightly more moral than one who is not curious, because sometimes he enters into the skin of another. I think a curious person is even a better lover than one who is not curious. Even my political approach to the Palestinian question, for example, sprang from curiosity. I am not a Middle East expert or a historian or a strategist. I simply asked myself, at a very young age, what it would be like if I were one of them. So, that’s what I do − get up in the morning and ask myself: What if?" - Israeli writer Amos Oz reflects on his life, on Israel, on writing, and discusses his newest work [more inside]
Power to the Peeple
The results of the 2012 Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest are in. The winner: Occupeep DC. Runners up: Peepius Maximus, What People Think Peeps Are (based on the popular meme), The Black Peep (based off of DC's Black Cat music venue), and Just Peeped (based off of the 2011 British Royal Wedding). In addition to the finalists, check out Peeps in Washington, Political Peeps, the full gallery of submissions that the Post received this year, and the winners from 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007. (Peepiously, peepiouslier, peepiousliest)
Astronaut with a camera - an amazing combination
Dutch astronaut and physician André Kuipers brought his camera aboard the International Space Station and took some photos in his spare time, the results are breathtaking. [more inside]
The worst linux PC ever
The worst linux PC ever. Running on an 8-bit microcontroller.
…it takes two hours to boot up to a bash prompt, and four more to load up Ubuntu and login.
Certainly not Hugh Hefner
Who Was Casanova? "Today, Casanova is so surrounded by myth that many people almost believe he was a fictional character. (Perhaps it’s hard to take seriously a man who has been portrayed by Tony Curtis, Donald Sutherland, Heath Ledger and even Vincent Price, in a Bob Hope comedy, Casanova’s Big Night [and many more].)" [more inside]
Downton Arby's
Downton Arby's. (SLYahooVideo)
WrestleMania III
25 years ago today, the professional wrestling boom sparked by the Captain Lou Albano/Cyndi Lauper "Rock 'n' Wrestling Connection" reached its zenith with WrestleMania III - whose attendance record of 93,173 for a live indoor "sporting" event in North America stood until 2010. The match between "Macho Man" Randy Savage and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat is prized by aficionados as one of the greatest in wrestling history. Look into the videoscope! [more inside]
Taste the Rainbow
Hull 0, Scunthorpe 3
How can one describe it? For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’. Christopher Priest on the 2012 Clarke Award shortlist, the self-described "most prestigious award for science fiction in Britain".
TETSUUUOOOO!!!....'s creator returns
In 1982 the manga, Akira (previously) , began its run. It would ultimately spawn a film that would lead the way for the growth of the anime medium outside of Japan. An attempted Americanized remake (previouslyer) was in production before being ultimately canceled.
The manga’s creator, Katsuhiro Otomo, in the meantime, had taken a 20 year break from long-form manga. It was recently announced that this break was coming to an end and that Otomo would be working on a new long-form shonen series.
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