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I Feel It Is My Duty to Speak Out [more inside]
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:41 PM PST - 34 comments

… And that’s why I’ve written Love Is a Rhythmical Art: a translation of Ovid’s entire Ars amatoria into limericks. As far as I can tell, it is the world’s first true limerepic — nearly 1,000 limericks in a row — as well as a faithful rendition of Ovid’s ancient advice for the modern world.

Sadly, the complete text is not there given, nor have I been able to discover it elsewhere. Perhaps you may be appeased by this Sexual Encounter, Narrated through Entries in the Index of Herbert Weir Smyth, (Ancient) Greek Grammar (1920).
posted by kenko at 8:36 PM PST - 7 comments

Cornell Lab of Ornithology Father's Day Photo Gallery. Check out some pictures of amazing bird dads with their young. As a bonus, here's Cornell's California Condor live cam, where you can see an adorable condor chick! All things bird can also be found on Cornell's main site. [more inside]
posted by FireFountain at 8:34 PM PST - 4 comments

Click that 'hood! is a geography game which tests your knowledge of city neighborhoods. To play Click that 'hood! you first need to select a city or town from the long list of locations available. You are then shown an interactive map of your chosen city. Your task is to correctly identify the location of twenty neighborhoods as quickly as possible by pointing them out on the map. If your town or city isn't already available to play on Click that 'hood! then you can add it yourself. If you have a shapefile of your local neighborhoods you can e-mail it to Code for America and they will add it to the game. Alternatively you can clone the game on GitHub and add the neighborhood data to your own instance of Click that 'hood. (Keir Clark/Maps Mania)
posted by Room 641-A at 5:26 PM PST - 42 comments

The New Yorker presents a split-screen tour of the same streets in New York City, from the nineteen-thirties and today. (slyt)
posted by fings at 4:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Relax with this wonderful unedited drone footage of (mostly) Arizona: Cardiff by the Sea, Winter in Flagstaff, Picacho Peak, San Xavier Mission, Flagstaff Snow Bowl. Madera Canyon, Marana Farmland, Mount Lemmon, Marana and Tucson Desert, Ironwood Forest, Between Sedona and Flagstaff, Flagstaff, Sedona Red Rock. Oh, and here's the dog chasing the drone. [more inside]
posted by tomcooke at 3:44 PM PST - 7 comments

How the world's first accountants counted on cuneiform
posted by bq at 2:58 PM PST - 10 comments

Contemporary eccentric full log sided custom home on 20+/- acres for the cat fancier! If you love cats this is the home for you! If not bring your sandblaster! Custom build, hardwood kitchen cabinets (Oak, Lacewood, and Bocote) artistically accented with river rock. Cat walkways and in great room Medieval cat castle with different levels (stone). All interior doors custom built (wood). Must see to believe it does exist!!! Once in a lifetime find extremely fun home!
posted by terooot at 2:39 PM PST - 57 comments

According to a report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset, a recently discovered backdoor Trojan used comments posted to Britney Spears's official Instagram account to locate the control server that sends instructions and offloads stolen data to and from infected computers. The innovation—by a so-called advanced persistent threat group known as Turla—makes the malware harder to detect because attacker-controlled servers are never directly referenced in either the malware or in the comment it accesses.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:50 PM PST - 21 comments

#TheRootTrip: From June 12-18, follow author Lawrence Ross on the blackest road trip ever: driving 3,000 miles from Los Angeles to "the tobacco farm where Booker T. Washington was enslaved in Roanoke, Va.," while patronizing as many black-owned businesses as possible along the way. "We’re also going black in time, and that means pulling out The Negro Motorist Green Book," 1957 edition.
posted by nicebookrack at 12:34 PM PST - 32 comments

Emily Larlham's loving nature and no-intimidation training methods helped these hard-luck dogs learn to dance and caper [Scottish jig music]. More on the Kikopup Youtube channel. (MeFites love Kikopup)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:28 PM PST - 8 comments

The last installment of the original “Choose Your Own Adventure” series came out in 1998, but since 2004, Chooseco, founded by one of the series’ original authors, R.A. Montgomery, has been republishing classic volumes, as well as new riffs on the form of interactive fiction that seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s and ’90s. The new editions also carry an additional feature—maps of the hidden structure of each book.

posted by Lexica at 12:02 PM PST - 25 comments

'And I Am Not Lying' - My first album of standup and storytelling [via mefi projects] by Metafilter's own chinese_fashion. [more inside]
posted by xingcat at 11:42 AM PST - 11 comments

Drive down any major interstate in the U.S., and you’ll see big blue signs decorated with business logos near most exits. Here’s who decides which businesses make it on the signs, and how much it all costs.

posted by Etrigan at 10:59 AM PST - 40 comments

The Strange Allure of Pan Books: Vintage Cult Film, TV Tie-In and Fab Fiction Book Covers [Dangerous Minds] “Everyone knows Penguin. They publish classic lit and high-end middle-class novels about those things people discuss over lattes. Pan books [wiki] were thrillers, pulp novels, movie and TV tie-ins, romances, some classics (Bronte, Trollope, Dickens), and best of all the dare to read alone horrors. Everyone read Pan. Because Pan books were always a guaranteed great read. [...] Pan Books was started by a former World War One flying ace, Alan Bott [wiki] in 1944. Bott believed in enjoyable reads available for all. He focussed on paperback books the public would enjoy which might bring them back to the brand for more.”
posted by Fizz at 9:41 AM PST - 19 comments

From photographer Julieanne Kost, three different excellent collections of work:
- streaked, blurred handheld pictures from a vehicle in Passenger Seat I and Passenger Seat II
- implausibly colored landscape abstracts in recent aerial photographs
- eerie photo manipulation collages in What I Dream
posted by cortex at 8:50 AM PST - 13 comments

Last year, a jaded Quebec hipster admitted that the burden of the secret I’ve been harbouring is growing too heavy for me to bear. By May of this year, MTV was on board. After her live performance at this year's Billboard Awards, it seems impossible to imagine that anyone ever hated her.
posted by clawsoon at 8:39 AM PST - 86 comments

Don't live somewhere along the path of totality for viewing the eclipse on 21 August, and are curious just what you might see from your location? Try the eclipse simulator.
posted by terrapin at 8:12 AM PST - 63 comments

Riot the Fox has a new tunnel in his backyard. His playmate Castiel the German Shepherd wants to catch him. The result is Pet Fox Gets A New Tunnel! [3m5s]. Literally a tutorial on why foxes are considered sly or wily. Watch to the end to see a great Animal Family Profile Portrait.
posted by hippybear at 3:26 AM PST - 18 comments

There has been a major fire at a residential tower block in London. As news outlets report casualties, it has emerged that residents have been warning the local authority about fire safety risks for several years.
posted by Catseye at 2:19 AM PST - 475 comments

An investigation into American writer Thomas Pynchon, who has never given an interview in his 54-year career by Brazilian journalist Natalie Portinari [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:46 AM PST - 24 comments

Lindsay Ellis tackles the satire paradox and the role of humor as a weapon against fascism. [CW: depictions of racism and homophobia]
posted by Deoridhe at 12:53 AM PST - 22 comments