May 21, 2015

"Piglet, put that pepper down." "Nnyyyyuuaahhhgggggggg!"

Little tough guy pizza thief.
posted by phunniemee at 10:09 PM PST - 27 comments

No Flight Attendants Were Harmed in the Making of This Film

What started as an amusing way to capture to fleeting attention of airline passengers, either with animation (Virgin Air 2007) , body paint (Air New Zealand 2009), elaborate costumed productions (Air New Zealand again, 2012), or sudden viral sensations (Delta Airlines 2008), the airline safety video has now transformed into a production that doubles as a marketing arm by hoping for that elusive YouTube traffic. With the summer 2015 travel season starting the airlines have started rolling out their newest productions. [more inside]
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:15 PM PST - 49 comments

BIG ANALOG

Tim Heffernan is a freelance writer interested in heavy industry and the natural world. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:56 PM PST - 6 comments

Welcome... To the world of tomorrow!

Tomorrowland: how Walt Disney’s strange utopia shaped the world of tomorrow - cryogenically frozen head not included.
posted by Artw at 7:45 PM PST - 21 comments

Don't think. Just shoot.

Lomography is style of pop photography based around the quirky cameras by the Austrian camera manufacturer known as Lomo. There are several camera types that fall under the lomography genre. Among some of the more popular, are the Diana and Holga. These cameras, and (all of them in the Lomo line) are usually poor technical cameras. They are "poorly" built and often have light leaks, poor alignment of their lenses or other defects. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 7:15 PM PST - 55 comments

The road to riches is lined with colored gravel & plastic lawn ornaments

Dave Reynolds, and his partner Frank Rolfe not only own mobile home parks but have a side business teaching potential investors that there's money to be made by buying parks and raising rents. The story from The Guardian. [more inside]
posted by readery at 6:15 PM PST - 27 comments

Redrawing Taylor Swift - Shake it Off Rotoscoped

Redrawing Taylor Swift - Shake it Off Rotoscoped (slyt) [more inside]
posted by mhum at 5:24 PM PST - 21 comments

Welcome to the Cup of Coffee Club. See ya.

"Of the 17,808 players (and counting) who’ve run up the dugout steps and onto a Major League field, only 974 have had one-game careers." These are some of their stories.
posted by artsandsci at 4:57 PM PST - 8 comments

Welcome to Pacific Tech's "Smart People on Ice".

30 Years Later, Real Genius is Still the Geek Solidarity Film That Nerd Culture Deserves.
posted by fings at 3:41 PM PST - 132 comments

Happy To Be Here

The first thing you need to know about secure psychiatric facilities is that their bathrooms smell strongly of pee. What does it feel like to suffer from a mental illness? How can you explain that unique pain? I don't know how to explain it but this post hits a few points in a profound way.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 3:29 PM PST - 23 comments

Student forced to remove online photos under threat of suspension

Imagine assembling a portfolio of over 4,000 photographs and then being forced to make it disappear or face life-altering consequences; that’s the situation sophomore Anthony Mazur is currently facing at Flower Mound High School in his Texas hometown.
posted by komara at 2:37 PM PST - 80 comments

Mind the gap

Harry Beck's original London Underground Tube Map was a design classic. The latest Transport For London version... Not so much.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:31 PM PST - 37 comments

The state bourbon festival of Kentucky is the Kentucky Bourbon Festival.

The Official State Amphibian of Kansas is the Barred Tiger Salamander. The Official State Firearm of Arizona is the Colt Single-Action Army Revolver. The Official State Carnivorous Plant of North Carolina is the Venus Flytrap. The Official State Artifact of California is the Chipped Stone Bear. [more inside]
posted by KathrynT at 11:58 AM PST - 74 comments

Tortoises Try Tiny Pancakes (as classical music plays)

Reviews are mixed. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 11:53 AM PST - 23 comments

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.”

The Trials of Hannah Arendt by Corey Robin [The Nation]
There’s a history to the conflict over Eichmann in Jerusalem, and like all such histories, the changes in how we read and argue about the book tell us as much about ourselves, and our shifting preoccupations and politics, as they do about Eichmann or Arendt. What has remained constant, however, is the wrath and the rage that Eichmann has aroused. Other books are read, reviled, cast off, passed on. Eichmann is different. Its errors and flaws, real and imagined, have not consigned it to the dustbin of history; they are perennially retrieved and held up as evidence of the book’s viciousness and its author’s vice. An “evil book,” the Anti-Defamation League said upon its publication, and so it remains. Friends and enemies, defenders and detractors—all have compared Arendt and her book to a criminal in the dock, her critics to prosecutors set on conviction.
[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:28 AM PST - 39 comments

Class of 2015

via NYT: "Each year, we put out a call for college application essays about money, work and social class. This year, we picked seven -- about pizza, parental sacrifice, prep school students, discrimination and deprivation."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:10 AM PST - 5 comments

when your Tinder pic is on point and you start harvesting the D like

Medieval Reactions to modern situations. [SLTwitter, some illustrations may be NSFW] [more inside]
posted by divined by radio at 10:02 AM PST - 36 comments

How Eddie Van Halen Hacks a Guitar

Eddie Van Halen describes early experiments with guitars, electronics, and home wiring in the quest for his famous tone. "I'm poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson."
posted by swift at 9:51 AM PST - 37 comments

I’m never seeing my Astoria friends again!

But as the city transformed into an exceedingly safe and exceedingly expensive place to live over the past two decades, it’s not only the crime and the pervasive decay that have fallen away, but the close proximity, creating a social commute that echoes and exacerbates a work commute that, at more than six hours a week, is the longest in the nation. People have always traveled to see their friends, of course, but rarely has it been so frequent or far to qualify as a commute
The Social Commute: How the Big Schlep Is Changing the Way New Yorkers Live
posted by griphus at 9:40 AM PST - 152 comments

Emerald. Elegant. Curious. Hidden. Unseen. Dragon. Treasures. Unbound.

The Asians Art Museum is a parody site bringing a cirtical lens to orientalist tropes in art museums, prompted particularly by rhetorical choices of the San Francisco Art Museum's 2009 Lords of the Samurai exhibition [audio]. It highlights the tendency for museums showing Asian art to present their shows as a"a harmless trip to a fantasyland of romanticized premodern Otherness, a place where dreams of Manifest Destiny never have to die?" [more inside]
posted by Miko at 7:50 AM PST - 24 comments

Why do busses bunch?

Why do busses always seem to bunch together? It's because they actually do. Finally, there's a web game to help you understand why. More intellectually stimulating than Desert Bus, but not much more gameplay. CityLab has more.
posted by entropone at 7:30 AM PST - 48 comments

I'm the Fastest Man Alive

On Tuesday, the first season finale of CW network's The Flash aired. Can't wait 'til next Fall for your Flash fix? There's always the grittier 1990 series, which ran for a single season. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:26 AM PST - 40 comments

Your Free Time is Forfeit

User Sparx recently mentioned checking sites of Japanese escape game makers for games of sufficient quality. But what if there were a single, constantly-updated website with links to an obscene number of those frustrating Japanese escape-the-room adventure games? Welcome to hell No1Game. I figured out the site on my own but if you need help, a guide to navigating the site follows. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:01 AM PST - 5 comments

"But as a husband, I was a sanctioned tyrant"

It is worth remembering that the things that were changed were ancient, hallowed traditions, sanctioned by time and religion and social practice. My right to rape my wife was part of common law – it had long seemed perfectly obvious and “natural” that the question of consent to sex simply didn’t arise in a marriage. (In many parts of the world, indeed, this still seems “natural”.) The idea that a wife was not a legally or economically separate person but a mere adjunct to her husband had very deep roots. Within my lifetime, even minimal changes to this idea were bitterly opposed.
Marriage was nothing to be proud of in 1983. On the eve of the Irish vote on marriage equality, Fintan O’Toole puts into context the change it will make to the "sanctitity" of marriage, by reflecting on the changes marriage in Ireland had already undergone since his own marriage in 1983. Tomorrow the Republic of Ireland will hold a referendum on Thirty-fourth Amendment of the Constitution (Marriage Equality) Bill 2015, which if passed would make gay marriage available.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:09 AM PST - 111 comments

Jackson Bird - Coming out

Jackson Bird posts a Youtube Video about coming out as transgender. Listen carefully, this moves pretty fast...
posted by HuronBob at 5:34 AM PST - 9 comments

How TV Sex Got Real

Whether it’s two female prisoners competing to see who can coax the most orgasms out of their fellow inmates in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black or a good, old-fashioned kiss-and-cut-away on ABC’s Scandal—the way intimacy is shown on the small screen has come a long way since 1952 when CBS forbade Lucille Ball from calling herself “pregnant” on national TV, substituting instead the priest-approved word “expecting.”
posted by ellieBOA at 4:34 AM PST - 22 comments

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