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What to do when your country is suffering under a spell of bad luck due to a surfeit of black cats and nobody's winning the lottery jackpot? You send them on holiday to a country where they do bring luck.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:46 PM PST - 30 comments

Computer animator and artist Alan Warburton imagines setting J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier to neon lights [via]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 8:08 PM PST - 17 comments

The $5 Billion Battle For America's Dinner Plate
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:56 PM PST - 195 comments

"There has never been a recording artist quite like Marcy Tigner." Marcy Tigner started out as a trombone player but soon created a puppet in her own likeness and used her child-like voice to teach others in Learning to do God's Work. All in all she put out more than 40 albums, and passed away in 2012 at age 90. YouTube: Join the Gospel Express (part of the Incredibly Strange Music series); Christmas with Marcy; Men in the Bible. Recent mention on Cracked.com (scroll down to end of #1)
posted by Melismata at 4:37 PM PST - 24 comments

What did he do in Mark Lawrenson's kitbag ? Ian McIntosh of the Guardian's on-hiatus "Football Weekly" tells the evocative tale of proto-70's legend Robin Friday, soccer's first rock star. (SLGrauniad audio - NFSW)
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 3:08 PM PST - 3 comments

The radio signal that occupies 4625 kHz has reportedly been broadcasting since the late 1970s. The earliest known recording of it is dated 1982. Ever since curious owners of shortwave radios first discovered the signal, it has broadcast a repeating buzzing noise. Every few years, the buzzer stops, and a Russian voice reads a mixture of numbers and Russian names.
posted by standardasparagus at 2:54 PM PST - 67 comments

In her new podcast, Mystery Show, Starlee Kine solves one small mystery per week. Kine's only rule is that the mystery can't be solved by Googling. The first mystery: a woman named Laura rents a video (Must Love Dogs, if you’re wondering), then returns to the store the very next day to find that it’s been cleaned out and shuttered overnight....Could the store really have disappeared so quickly? If they knew they were closing, why would have they made Laura sign up for a membership, or allowed her to rent anything at all? [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:10 PM PST - 73 comments

20 years of space photos: an oral history of Astronomy Picture of the Day
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:24 PM PST - 12 comments

You Can Thank Genetic Engineering For Your Delicious Cheese (io9) Eventually, calf stomachs became a byproduct of the veal industry. But in the 1970s, America’s growing appetite for cheese collided with its mounting aversion to killing newborn cows. Anticipating a crisis of supply and demand, researchers turned to a then-unprecedented technology in food science
posted by CrystalDave at 1:08 PM PST - 56 comments

"Readiness has also become the slogan of the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rather than a galvanizing declaration of devotion, the slogan is a queasy-making line in the sand. When the legitimacy of the system the president presides over is in question, as racial oppression, capitalism, and police brutality are discussed on a global scale, choosing a president isn’t a royal crowning. The conflation of being “Ready for Hillary” with feminist allegiance brings the worst problems of political fandom, racism, and poor civic awareness to the forefront. Secretary Clinton is portrayed as a fulfillment of a progressive checklist or schedule rather than an individual candidate."
posted by HumanComplex at 12:24 PM PST - 129 comments

Amsterdam is planning out a new steel canal bridge that will be constructed entirely by 3D Printers. Here's a video of these special printers in action.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 11:51 AM PST - 17 comments

A collection of assorted useful kitchen charts (SLTumblr)
posted by griphus at 11:10 AM PST - 108 comments

After Georgia Dunn put Breaking Cat News on hiatus for the birth of her daughter Guinevere, last night she had a special announcement: the broadcast Breaking Cat News returns with a special report. Elvis, Puck, Lupin, and Tommy have returned! [more inside]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:59 AM PST - 23 comments

An overview of folklore, religion and popular intuition surrounding childbirth, pregnant women, and young infants: abortion by aswang, blood-drinking Lilith, curses from witches, skeletal-faced spirits, and demonic births. content advisory: infant mortality [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:41 AM PST - 5 comments

If black lives were as long lived as those of whites, some major elections may have turned out differently. From the article: "The unspoken suggestion is that Republicans know this and will oppose programs that increase Black health and decrease Black poverty in part for the same reasons that they have favored incarceration and permanent disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies."
posted by batbat at 9:39 AM PST - 37 comments

Older shelter cats are often hard to place, and get overlooked at shelters. An Illinois no-kill shelter partnered with a yoga studio to raise money give some kitties more exposure. The results were adorable.
posted by MrGuilt at 9:28 AM PST - 26 comments

All of these stories referred to VNYL in some capacity as “Netflix for vinyl.” Consequence Of Sound did a video interview with VNYL’s founder, Nick Alt, who referred to his service as being like “old-school Netflix.” The idea was that VNYL’s staff would hand-curate a selection of three records for each subscriber (for a fee of $24 per month), and mail out those records to those subscribers, who would have no idea what musical selections they might receive. Then, subscribers would be allowed to keep those records as long as they wanted and return them at any time, at which point, VNYL’s staff would send out a new batch of hand-curated records to that subscriber (...) None of these stories, however, mentioned an element of U.S. copyright law called the first-sale doctrine — specifically section §109(b), popularly known as the Record Rental Amendment Of 1984, which makes it illegal to rent records.

--The comic failings of a Kickstarter project that promised a “Netflix for vinyl.”
posted by almostmanda at 8:17 AM PST - 104 comments

StyleLikeU's "What's Underneath" Project features short videos of people from all walks of life slowly stripping down to their underwear, while giving revealing interviews intended to show that 'style is not the clothes one wears, but spirit, and comfort in one's skin.' Topics covered are as diverse as their subjects, and include beauty, fashion, disability, diseases and chronic conditions including albinism and cancer, career, gender, identity, body image/dysmorphia, abuse, miscarriage, etc. The majority of the subjects are women. Some videos may be NSFW. (Via)
posted by zarq at 8:13 AM PST - 3 comments

The Tumblr blog "Over the Hills and Far Away", aka "Beggars Opera: History, Fashion, Romance and Deadpan Snarking" has researched and collected the Best of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1st and 2nd editions (1785 and 1788 - source material from Google Books).
Part One: Admiral of the Narrow Seas - Breeches ; Part Two: Cackling Farts - Duck F-ck-r ; Part Three: Flash Lingo - Goose Riding ; Part Four: Hopkins - Medlar ; Part Five: Member Mug - Potato Trap ; Part Six: Punk - Sugar Stick ; Part Seven: Tallywags - Welch Rabbit ; All Parts in Reverse Order .
Come for the "Queen Dick", stay for the lower-case 's' that looks like 'f'. ("Boʃom"! "Teʃticles"!)
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:17 AM PST - 34 comments

Elite firms are sidelining the UK's bright working-class applicants in favour of privileged, "polished" candidates, a report says. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission says these firms draw from a small pool of graduates, who probably went to private or selective schools. This version of talent can be "mapped to middle-class status", it adds.
posted by marienbad at 2:36 AM PST - 89 comments