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The Compleat Steve has a number of articles written by Steve Martin. I especially liked A Public Apology, How I Joined Mensa, and Writing Is Easy!
posted by supercrayon at 9:06 PM PST - 60 comments

How Do You Get Crabs From A Gorilla? One of many little evolutionary cases Carl Zimmer tackles in The Parasite Files.
posted by homunculus at 8:19 PM PST - 28 comments

Suicide food. Yep, some animals just have an inexplicable death wish. Classic. Creepy. Cute. Sporty. Disturbingly sexy. Just plain confusing. These animals all have one thing in common. They're freakin' tasty.
posted by miss lynnster at 8:14 PM PST - 43 comments

An assassin with alleged links to the underworld shot and killed the mayor of Nagasaki yesterday. Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito was a tireless anti-nuclear proliferation activist who travelled the world to spread his pacifist message and help serve witness to the horrors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His comments during bombing anniversaries have criticized the United States as well as North Korea and Iran for contributing to proliferation.
posted by stagewhisper at 7:45 PM PST - 20 comments

Vonnegut's Asshole. To be honest, this wasn't originally intended as a tribute to the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. It started as a goofy experiment, just to find out how many authors I could persuade to send me drawings of their own assholes. But then Kurt went and died on us last week. So now it's become something else.
posted by roll truck roll at 7:04 PM PST - 19 comments

The International Music Score Library Project. PDF downloads of public domain classical music scores. From solo piano to full symphony orchestra. 2,762 works and counting.
posted by chrismear at 6:34 PM PST - 12 comments

JGuitar, a rather useful tool for those learning the guitar or experimenting with alternate tunings. You can even bookmark a certain tuning.
posted by signal at 5:41 PM PST - 6 comments

A young mother and her son's losing battle with cancer in twenty photographs. Renee C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature and deservedly so. If you find these photgraphs as moving as I do, let me just go ahead and point you to the National Childhood Cancer Foundation and the Hospice Foundation of America.
posted by Heminator at 4:11 PM PST - 82 comments

The 15 most outrageous claims in pop music history.
posted by jbickers at 3:06 PM PST - 85 comments

Nazi Robot Attack
posted by kirkaracha at 1:23 PM PST - 57 comments

Gliders spearheaded many major invasions and other operations in the European theatre of World War II, including the invasion of Normandy. I had no idea, but it turns out the House of Representatives recently passed a resolution honoring the glider pilots, and there's a Silent Wings Museum in Lubbock, TX. The World War II Glider Pilots Association site gives more background on the men, the planes, and the missions, as well as the memorable title quote. There's even a movie. [More Inside]
posted by Mister_A at 1:19 PM PST - 27 comments

...By refusing to recognize or admit that the Vietnam War was from its inception primarily a civil war, and not part of a larger, centrally-directed international conspiracy, policymakers assumed that North Vietnam was, like the United States, waging a limited war, and therefore that it would be prepared to settle for something less than total victory (especially if confronted by military stalemate on the ground in the South and the threat of aerial bombardment of the North). In so making this assumption, policymakers not only ignored two millennia of Vietnamese history, but also excused themselves from confronting the harsh truth that civil wars are, for their indigenous participants, total wars, and that no foreign participant in someone else's civil war can possibly have as great a stake in the conflict's outcome--and attendant willingness to sacrifice--as do the indigenous parties involved.

The Wrong War - Why We Lost in Vietnam
See also Who Lost Vietnam ?
See also Vietnam in Retrospect: Could We Have Won?
posted by y2karl at 11:24 AM PST - 77 comments

Learning From Ike: What a Republican realist could teach George Bush. "If we hope to succeed, we manage evil. We minimize, mitigate, and manipulate evil. But efforts to pre-emptively eliminate evil are prone to end in overreaction and destabilization, with consequences that are often worse than the original problem."
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:01 AM PST - 36 comments

If you took the concept of a cat scratching post, and replaced "cat" with "Horny Dog" and "Scratching Post" with "Hollowed Out Fuckdoll," you'd have the Hotdoll.
posted by jonson at 10:18 AM PST - 78 comments

The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. My favorites for 2007 are International Reporting, National Reporting, Editorial Cartooning (one example, and another), and Breaking News Photo. The Pulitzer site archive is an amazing source of browsing material. Unfortunately, it is not the easiest site to navigate. So here are some previous winners: 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000
posted by McGuillicuddy at 9:46 AM PST - 23 comments

14-century old Japanese business folds. How often does one get to type that?
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:45 AM PST - 32 comments

Rivers And Tides sic transit gloria mundi
posted by vronsky at 9:38 AM PST - 28 comments

Etch-a-Sketch art by etchy, Flickr set; by Michael McNevin; by Wanderline. D.I.Y. Brainwave Etch-a-Sketch. How it works.
posted by nickyskye at 9:26 AM PST - 16 comments

The inaugural edition of Open Medicine, a peer-reviewed, independent, open-access medical journal is now available online. The online medical journal launched in the aftermath of a rift last year between some editors and the publisher of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Among the first interesting articles? a review of studies which suggests that health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States (but differences are not consistent), even though spending is higher south of the border.
posted by furtive at 9:22 AM PST - 6 comments

Photographs of Manhattan 1964-1969 By Irwin Klein. Immigrants, storefronts, gangs, mafiosi, street scenes. More Klein here. My fave. First link via
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:20 AM PST - 19 comments

A look back at the NC2000, a short history of the one of the first photojournalist-quality digicams. [via]
posted by Armitage Shanks at 6:57 AM PST - 18 comments

Do you want to look hard but can't stand the needle? Detachable Tattoo Sleeves are the answer. Unfortunately, small is out of stock at the moment.
posted by tellurian at 6:34 AM PST - 50 comments

A Moment on Earth: hundreds of pictures of different places on earth, all taken at exactly the same time (Flash Based). On August 5th, 2004 at 12:00 Noon GMT, 60 filmmakers in over 40 countries and on all 7 continents captured a single "moment" on earth. The results were used to build a composite image of Iraq and the Pacific Ocean. By hovering over the composite image, the individual frames of the mosiac can be viewed along with details about the individual pictures.
posted by Mave_80 at 5:54 AM PST - 14 comments

How To Talk To Girls At Parties by Neil Gaiman. Full text and reading by the author: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 3:48 AM PST - 39 comments

Word is that the DGSE - the French secret intelligence service - knew in January 2001 that al Queda was planning to hijack a US aircraft and may have given warning. (The original article that appeared in Le Monde 2 days ago)
posted by pwedza at 1:11 AM PST - 49 comments

Body Symmetry and Intelligence
posted by Gyan at 12:30 AM PST - 37 comments