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College Chess Team Recruiting Scandal! Stacking the deck with grandmasters allegedly earning degrees. Ludicrous/pathetic consequences.
posted by crunchburger at 9:36 PM PST - 8 comments

Yes! Gulp Your Food Down! Feast your eyes on snackist salamanders and this future classic: not a salamander, but a very strange suction-feeding tadpole. [Quicktime required. ]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:07 PM PST - 3 comments

Antique Botanical Prints from Panteek, and many more.
posted by hama7 at 8:55 PM PST - 3 comments

The Disney Doctrine (see also Team Rodent)
posted by eilatan at 7:42 PM PST - 11 comments

Emma Peel could eat Buffy Summers for breakfast. An online encyclopedia dedicated to one of the best shows to come out of Britain, The Avengers. It's also the best TV fansite I've ever seen, I think--comprehensive, well-designed, smart without being "inside" or academic, and free of fanboy attitude. Even if you've never watched the show, take some time to look around. [more inside]
posted by Prospero at 4:53 PM PST - 24 comments

From crematorium scandals to pimp suits and Ben Curtis in between, the Chattanooga area has it all. Enter our latest wonder: Beer for the Homeless.com. Created by a local Talk Radio DJ or two, the site is a serious attempt (ok, it's kinda tongue-in-cheek) to stop homeless citizens from hassling people for beer money. Well, they made their first delivery last week and have some photos and quote from their "clients".
posted by mkelley at 2:53 PM PST - 4 comments

Toys of the 80s
They don't make them like they used to.
posted by Mwongozi at 2:45 PM PST - 10 comments

The Young Hipublicans. "Still searching for their identities, many of these kids are not yet prepared to declare a particular political affiliation. This is where the conservative campus activists come in. Having recognized the importance of conservativism to their own lives, they have committed themselves to the task of bringing out the unacknowledged conservatism in other students. The mission of today's activists involves less an act of persuading their peers to accept an ideology than in awakening them to the fact that they already embody it." Welcome to Room 101.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 1:45 PM PST - 32 comments

I have a what!?! And now ladies and gentlemen, here is our first candidate for the most annoying song of this summer.
posted by beatnik808 at 1:00 PM PST - 32 comments

Jacko wants to make a run for the border. What happens when you want more fast food? Make democracy work for and contact your Congressman. Yikes! Two threads about Michael Jackson in one day? It must be Friday!
posted by Bag Man at 12:49 PM PST - 1 comments

Footage of a young Jay-Z freestyling. You gotta start somewhere (From trickology.com if you care).
posted by Slimemonster at 11:30 AM PST - 7 comments

MAKE MONEY (?) FAST by blogging. Someone who just doesn't get it tries to cash in on the blognomenon -- but who's actually gonna pay $3/month to read blogs? Oh, and you can get paid to blog...but given the blogs they point to as successful examples, I can't imagine that the're raking in the cash. Found via Google TextAd on MeFi. Really.
posted by Vidiot at 10:58 AM PST - 22 comments

Economists is a little bit of socio-political commentary that doubles as Friday Flash. More likely to generate chuckles than comments...
posted by BentPenguin at 10:42 AM PST - 3 comments

Fo shizzle my nizzle! At last, the lingustic puzzle is solved, or at least attempted. Over and over. And over. Definition - "for the sizzle" of tasty burgers on the grill. Often used by members of lower classes because they cannot taste the tasty burgers, nor enjoy the sizzle.
posted by xmutex at 10:02 AM PST - 33 comments

What is the value of good customer service? An oft asked question indeed, but one that is being answered as wee speak. The abject failure of Dixons, a UK retailer, to repair a TV set may cost them $475,000 of lost sales in less than a week (start from the bottom and work up....). [Via The Register.]
posted by davehat at 9:36 AM PST - 10 comments

Elliott could no longer bear the waste. He had six staff and a budget of £3.5m a year. He had a potential client group of 25,000 users ... but at the end of all his work and all that public money, the total number of detox beds he was able to provide was five. The Guardian reports from the front-line of the drugs war. (part two) You may have no interest in Drugs or the UK but read this superb piece for a profile of a bureaucracy in farcical, tragic, total collapse.
posted by grahamwell at 9:31 AM PST - 5 comments

Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it.
posted by studentbaker at 9:20 AM PST - 50 comments

I'm glad I live in D.C. Why? Because we'll never run out of News of the Wierd: "FBI Specialist runs over the foot of a "person of interest" then gets police to issue him a ticket for 'walking to create a hazard'."
posted by omidius at 9:19 AM PST - 4 comments

Mort pour la France Setting aside partisan differences and arguments re: Iraq for the moment, and at the risk of offending the more cynical of the denizens that lurk within with what they may consider the smarminess of this link, we would do well to remember during the upcoming weekend, what Memorial Day should be about - a tribute to those who have served & fallen in uniform.
posted by Pressed Rat at 9:14 AM PST - 13 comments

Christian sex ed recordings from the 1940's are delightful - a few choice tracks pulled in mp3 format. I expect to hear some of these lines sampled into techno tracks and pronto.
posted by jonson at 9:10 AM PST - 18 comments

Lomographic Society International. Long live the lomo. Great cameras, great photographs, great site.
posted by tomplus2 at 7:19 AM PST - 27 comments

Cuba is best known for its legendary cigars and bearded dictators, but it's also home to some of the healthiest ecosystems in the Caribbean. Pygmy owls, bee hummingbirds, and solenodons share the islands of Cuba with tiny tiny tree frogs, trogons, and one of the largest groups of snails in the world. There are problems, though. Many species such as the giant cursorial owl, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the smallest of the giant sloths have been wiped out over the last 5,000 years, and other species are threatened.
posted by bshort at 7:12 AM PST - 8 comments

Here is the Michael Jackson Nasal Exchange Mechanism: Now name that nose! And, if you don't like it, go ahead and make a face of your own ! [First link via Bifurcated Rivets. Usual Flash restrictions apply.]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 6:54 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Who Was Photog? In 1986, an 11-year-old boy named Nathan Bitner designed a character named Fearless Photog. He won a contest to have his creation made into an action figure in the He-Man/Masters of the Universe line. The figure was never actually never produced. In 2003, a website specializing in 80's junk culture asked Who was Nathan Bitner? (scroll down for the comments). It's a story about call girl named Gemini, working for Bungie (creators of Halo), insurmountable credit card dept, joining the army at 28...
posted by andrewzipp at 6:47 AM PST - 23 comments

WWASP still doesn't get it. A sort of follow-up post to this thread - despite constant attempts to shut down various facilities, the organization is still setting up schools all over the world for parents to have their children "kidnapped" and sent to. Despite massive exposes of the organization, and Samoan, Mexican, Czech and now Costa Rican governments stepping in, these schools are still running. It bothers me to see this list of violations and am wondering how much better it is to be in those schools than in jail. What's worse - is they are working to transfer the students to one of four of their other compounds - Casa By The Sea, Tranquility Bay, Academy at Ivy Ridge or Spring Creek Lodge - at least the last two are in the US but the first two are under serious scrutiny themselves. Several State Officials are beginning to take notice but at this point, (aside from consular inquiries), all the state department has done is issue a warning. Can anything else be done? SHOULD anything else be done?
posted by bkdelong at 5:56 AM PST - 17 comments

Who Is Mary Rosh?
Mary Rosh often spoke sweetly of her days as a student of John's, she gave a glowing Amazon.com review of his book "More Guns, Less Crime," she criticized anyone who questioned John's research or his conclusions, and she attacked other researchers in her ardent defense of Lott's idea that more guns on the streets leads to less crime.
Take that Jayson, you rookie! Let a real man (guffaw) show you how to write cheat!
posted by nofundy at 5:34 AM PST - 5 comments

Comic Strip Classics Stamps. (via Dublog).
Related :- A nice collection of exhibits at the National Postal Museum, part of the Smithsonian (such as this exhibit of Cuban stamps and this one on FDR's stamp collecting); the Bath Postal Museum of British postal history; stamps of Greenland; stamps of Tibet.
posted by plep at 5:32 AM PST - 2 comments