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Did You Hear the One About the Suicide Bomber?
After Sept. 11, Shazia Mirza became famous by telling a single (some think abominable) joke. It's a funny thing, being a devout Muslim female comic.
posted by y2karl at 9:06 PM PST - 33 comments

Mary, Queen of Scots (warning: music) is one of British royalty's most adored and most reviled figures, putting her in the select company of arch-rival Elizabeth I (sigh: music again) and Charles I. (The latter is an Anglican saint, although not everybody is quite so enthused.) Wince at the description of her execution, read some poems about her--or, indeed, some of her own poems--or visit her grave in Westminster Abbey.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:21 PM PST - 3 comments

Nigerian email scam dudes. Possibly the first visual evidence of the rapscallions behind the scam that just keeps on sucking in new 'investors'.
posted by apocalypse miaow at 3:40 PM PST - 13 comments

With the wee hubbub that's going on at the moment in our government, it might be nice to take a step back and look at what this means for us Internet users (and more specifically, bloggers). When I pondered this for a moment, my mind drifted to that briefly bearded granola and silicon presidential hopeful of times long forgotten. Well, Al Gore may have invented the Internet (or, as he put it, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"), but it is this man who has truly embraced the medium.

The greatest difference between this man and the cowboy currently shootin' from the hip in the Oval Office isn't about taxes. It's not about health care. And, yes, I contend it's not even about women's rights. The greatest difference between the Son of Bush and the Dean isn't about left or right or conservative or liberal. It's all about the flow of information. [More inside]
posted by Hammerikaner at 1:31 PM PST - 9 comments

SFGate is running an article on an internet assisted suicide that's worth reading. Not because of the minutiae, or any implied morality/immorality regarding suicide, but simply because it's a well-researched, well-written story of the culture of those who are about to die.
posted by Jairus at 1:26 PM PST - 21 comments

Whether you like your news right or your news left, there are watchers watching those who report. Anyone have more examples of those who keep an eye on journalists? Does it change anyone's thinking when they discover that the story they read was, for example, written by Jayson Blair, or has the damage already been done?
posted by swerdloff at 1:11 PM PST - 4 comments

Joshka Fischer Said What? That The U.S. Needs Another Boston Tea Party? Hidden in the depths of this very interesting article by Timothy Garton-Ash, on Europe's misplaced anti-Americanism, is a very interesting revelation from Germany's Green Party-carrying Foreign Minister. To what extent are relations between the pro-American and the anti-American Europe and the United States - the so-called "Old and New Europe" - based on misperceptions? Is Europe, like the Middle East and, well, the whole wide world, too complex for the current U.S. administration to understand? Is it really possible for American foreign to swerve round France and Germany? [Fwiw, my two centimes is that it is.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:06 PM PST - 8 comments

Dangerous Road Signs. Okay, so, I'm posting a link to a photoshop contest: I'm lame, that's a long established fact. That said, some of these really did amuse me - take a gander if you're up for a laugh.
posted by jonson at 12:26 PM PST - 17 comments

The one-eyed demon. In 1999 Bhutan, one of the most isolated countries in the world (Bhutan seems to have been the model för Shangri-la in James Hilton's "Lost Horizon"), became the last country in the world to adopt television. The king of Bhutan wasn't much interested in gross national product, but in his own concept "gross national happiness" and he believed that TV would increase his nation's happiness. Since then, Bhutan has experienced a crime wave unlike anything the country has previously known. This article tells the story and claims that TV breeds crime. But the questions raised by this story are wider than that: what is it that makes our Western TV-Coke-advertisement-culture totally irresistible? Why do people instantly feel they want it when they see it? Why hasn't any nation looked at the junk we have to offer, laughed at us and walked away?
posted by Termite at 12:06 PM PST - 32 comments

Blue collar whimsy : art crime. After viewing abstract sculptures by John Chamberlain crafted with materials such as crushed automobile parts, a group of electricians created their own work and placed it alongside Chamberlain's. Is this mad for real? Class warfare? "This was something that wasn't mistaken as a work of art by anyone other than the electricians."
posted by the fire you left me at 9:47 AM PST - 11 comments

Women are sexually aroused by women regardless of which gender they have sex with. "Researchers measured the psychological and physiological sexual arousal in homosexual and heterosexual men and women as they watched erotic films. There were three types of erotic films: those featuring only men, those featuring only women and those featuring male and female couples. As with previous research, the researchers found that men responded consistent with their sexual orientations. In contrast, both homosexual and heterosexual women showed a bisexual pattern of psychological as well as genital arousal. That is, heterosexual women were just as sexually aroused by watching female stimuli as by watching male stimuli, even though they prefer having sex with men rather than women."
posted by NortonDC at 8:49 AM PST - 96 comments

What am I? Clearly the most pressing question facing the human race today. Every individual human brain contains around 10^12 (1 trillion) neurons and 10^15 (1 quadrillion) synapses, capable of changing in milliseconds, and there are 6x10^9 (6 billion) people on this planet, all potentially capable of interacting and influencing one another. Last year alone 1.6x10^11 (160 billion) minutes of international telephone calls were made between people talking at a rate of 120 to 150 words per minute. A collection of articles at newscientist.com.
posted by mokey at 7:57 AM PST - 12 comments

"Twenty-two years ago, late in the evening one night in March of 1981, to be specific, my mother was killed in an auto accident on Foothill Boulevard in a town called Claremont." Talking Points Memo author Joshua Marshall, one of the best-known political webloggers, takes an unexpected personal detour.
posted by rcade at 7:56 AM PST - 4 comments

The Internet is better than MTV!
posted by son_of_minya at 7:38 AM PST - 11 comments

The Woodblock Prints of Ando Hiroshige. Images and essays - a treat for ukiyo-e fans.
Also good for ukiyo-e admirers :- Universes in Collision: Men and Women in 19th Century Japanese Prints; and Hiroshige: A Shoal of Fishes.
posted by plep at 4:07 AM PST - 4 comments

Large-scale marijuana cultivation in National Parks and forests. "[Growers] are killing wildlife, diverting streams, introducing nonnative plants, creating fire and pollution hazards, and bringing the specter of violence. For the moment, we are failing both parts of our mission, and that is tragic." This is not a new problem. "The reasons are obvious: the land is fertile, remote and free.  There's no risk of forfeiture, plantations are difficult to trace, and growers have land agents outmanned, outspent and outgunned."
posted by letitrain at 12:49 AM PST - 18 comments

10 Great Gay Cars For 2003. I'm into leather...interior.
posted by adrober at 12:27 AM PST - 19 comments

The Armarium. Online Historical Fencing Manuals & Texts at the Association for the Renaissance Martial Arts (ARMA).
posted by misteraitch at 12:14 AM PST - 2 comments