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Rehabilitating Carson: "Why do some people continue to hold Rachel Carson responsible for millions of malaria deaths?" [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 11:20 PM PST - 20 comments

Who do you want her to be... next year? Fans of Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku vow to save the television series Dollhouse from cancellation by Fox Television - eight months before it is scheduled to broadcast. Is this just guerilla fan-marketing, or are they serious? Or both? (previously on MetaFilter)
posted by ZachsMind at 10:00 PM PST - 138 comments

The Andy Rooney Game. Here’s how you play: take out everything but the first sentence and the last sentence from Andy Rooney’s latest segment on 60 Minutes. Then you put that on youtube. That’s it! Check it out:
posted by hellbient at 9:27 PM PST - 64 comments

FruitAndVeggieGuru – everything you need to know about the delicious fruits and vegetables you enjoy. Answers about how to lower your cholesterol or how to prepare asparagus. You’ll find loads of background and variety information, nutrition specifics, serving sizes, preparation ideas and care and handling tips.
posted by netbros at 7:04 PM PST - 18 comments

Where would you like to spend the rest of eternity? The man who designed the Pringles potato crisp packaging system has been buried in one of the iconic cans. Sandra Ilene West was buried in her favorite Ferrari. And a man buried in a suitcase (not by choice, it would appear) Previously: 1, 2
posted by subgear at 6:30 PM PST - 30 comments

Paul Sills, son of Viola Spolin and one of the fathers of Chicago style improv comedy through his work with The Compass Players (who sort of morphed into Second City) and through his Story Theatre work has passed away at age 80. Chicago has lost two of its legends in one day.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:20 PM PST - 4 comments

At Taipei's Modern Toilet restaurant, the chairs are toilets. You sit around sinks and bathtubs, and eat chocolate soft-serve out of little toilet-shaped bowls. Bon appetit!
posted by jbickers at 5:08 PM PST - 55 comments

Hey, command-line nerds! You shell geeks over there! Switch over to your browser and go to goosh.org right now. [more inside]
posted by sdodd at 4:52 PM PST - 51 comments

Legendary artist Alton Kelley created a graphic style that rocked the world beginning in the psychedelic sixties. His concert posters, logo designs, LP album covers, and fine art have forevermore defined that time. Kelley passed away peacefully at home on Sunday, June 1, 2008 of complications from a long illness.
posted by terrapin at 4:09 PM PST - 18 comments

Show me a PR person who is "accurate" and "truthful," and I'll show you a PR person who is unemployed. In The Wake Of Scott McClellan's New Book, CBS Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen Says PR People Are Aghast At The Truth. Includes a follow-up to the mountain of reactions he received.
posted by thisisdrew at 2:41 PM PST - 71 comments

A flipside of Kitty Wigs^TM, for the stylish kitty - pointed out previously - is available for the stylish kitty owner!
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 2:12 PM PST - 17 comments

Cool: Scientists have genetically tweaked bacteria to create simple computers. Scary (probably unnecessarily): They're E.coli bacteria. Funny: The bacteria are able to solve the “Burnt Pancake Problem”. Money quote: “It’s kind of like that computer in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. It’s been working on a problem so long that by the time it comes up with an answer, everybody forgot the question.”
posted by wendell at 1:12 PM PST - 41 comments

Courtesy of Cuteoverload.com: Cats 'n' Racks
posted by james_cpi at 11:59 AM PST - 38 comments

Sammy Davis Jr—entertainer , photographer... camwhore... SATANIST!!!??? Did hanging out with this guy make Sammy bad? Or was he just selling his soul to be groovy? [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster at 11:56 AM PST - 51 comments

It's an unmanned, flying gun.
posted by socalsamba at 11:42 AM PST - 55 comments

Lists of resume blunders. “I am a wedge with a sponge taped to it. My purpose is to wedge myself into someone’s door to absorb as much as possible.”
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 11:06 AM PST - 78 comments

The world loves the banana - they are the world's most popular fruit and the fourth most consumed food on our planet. According to Johann Hari in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it appears that the variety of bananas loved the world over - the Cavendish - is headed for extinction due to Fusarium oxysporum (Panama disease). [more inside]
posted by cinemafiend at 10:34 AM PST - 35 comments

Flash, PDF, two great tastes that go great together? And now you can use PDF flash movies to put videos in your powerpoint – er… what?
posted by Artw at 10:29 AM PST - 38 comments

Europe has produced its share of outstanding jazz pianists. Here are five of them: Martial Solal (French/Algerian-born, born 1927); Tete Montoliu (Catalonian/Spanish, 1933-97); Enrico Pieranunzi (Italian, born 1949); Misha Mengelberg (Dutch/Ukrainian-born, born 1935); Marco di Marco (Italian, born 1940). [more inside]
posted by ornate insect at 10:26 AM PST - 7 comments

"Lost is a far more ambitious piece of media, which uses the entire web as its canvas and its entire audience as its creators. I'd suggest this piece of work - Lost, when viewed in its entirety - is truly new."
posted by lunit at 10:05 AM PST - 99 comments

In 1948, W. Eugene Smith, best known for his brutally honest war photography, traveled to Kremmling, Colorado to document the life of a small town country doctor. The result, a splendid piece for Life magazine, has been hailed as one of the first photo essays of the modern photojournalism age. [more inside]
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:00 AM PST - 13 comments

Ellas Otha Bates R.I.P. We all knew him better as that cat with the rectangular-shaped Gretsch who played it with the hambone beat. Goodbye, Bo Diddley. And thank you.
posted by runningdogofcapitalism at 9:43 AM PST - 100 comments

Madman or genius? Well... madman. But being confined to an asylum (with one of his symptoms described as "manic invention") didn't keep Karl Hans Janke from developing elaborate theories of atomic energy, flight, space travel and the history of humanity, creating over 4,000 complex drawings and even models over 40 years of incarceration for paranoid schizophrenia. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 9:00 AM PST - 4 comments

TCP/IP via bongo drums
posted by Meatbomb at 8:53 AM PST - 19 comments

The Big Picture The Boston Globe launches a new blog focusing on a large single image from the day's news. It's kind of surprising how rare it is to see a really big photo on newspaper sites these days and this blog makes the simple concept work. [via mefi projects]
posted by mathowie at 8:05 AM PST - 45 comments

Enka is popular Japanese music which started to become popular in the Showa era after World War II. Until very recently, it's pretty much been popular only with the older crowd or in karaoke. Recently, though, a popular young star from Philadelphia has brought about a resurgence with the younger crowd. Look at his videos and be amazed. Presenting Jero. [more inside]
posted by greasepig at 7:36 AM PST - 18 comments

The year was 1957: the Soviet Union had launched the cutest little sattelite ever. And it didn't just look good, it sounded good, too! As sweet a sound as any avant garde composer of the 1950's might dream up! Of course, the US would have to get a little metal ball of its own into space, but things didn't go so well. They did manage to get one up there in 1958, but nobody knows if it sounded as good as ol' Sputnik. But anyway, most folks weren't listening to satellites 50 years ago, they were listening to, well, lessee, there was... [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:35 AM PST - 16 comments

Selected Stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
posted by owhydididoit at 7:14 AM PST - 45 comments

Another Paul Graham essay, Cities and Ambition. This one's one of his better ones though. His claim: each city sends its inhabitants a distinct message about how they should live their lives. New York City sends the message that you should be richer. Cambridge sends the message that you should be smarter. Berkeley sends the message that you should live better. Consequently, the city you live in has a profound effect on what you strive for, what you value, and how you channel your ambitions. Place matters; choose wisely. [more inside]
posted by decoherence at 6:52 AM PST - 89 comments

British Literature Blogs is the brainchild of six British literary bloggers. Each working hard at bringing readers to forgotten or overlooked books, our BritLitBloggers decided that combining their latest blog entries together in one place would highlight the breadth and depth of British literary blogging.
posted by Fizz at 6:36 AM PST - 2 comments

An opinion piece by Edward N. Luttwak in the May 12 Sunday New York Times declares that Obama is an apostate under Islamic law (Sharia), and thus that an Obama Presidency would compromise US relations with the Middle East. This Sunday, Clark Hoyt, the NYT ombudsman, was sorry.
posted by flotson at 6:33 AM PST - 56 comments

RFK Funeral Train A moving audio and photo account of photographer Paul Fusco's experience on the RFK funeral train to Washington DC. {via NYTimes Magazine}
posted by doug3505 at 5:10 AM PST - 7 comments

To celebrate its hundredth edition the Observer Sport Monthly publishes it's ten best Top Tens. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:41 AM PST - 11 comments

The plague is over, lets party. Article by Elizabeth Pisani describing the troubling consequences of a gay scene in a world where HIV is treatable and AIDS is avoidable.
posted by seanyboy at 3:26 AM PST - 45 comments

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program has just released "Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.3: The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States." It makes for pretty interesting reading. [more inside]
posted by chuckdarwin at 2:45 AM PST - 6 comments

page2rss is a simple, effective RSS scraper. For instance, here's an RSS feed for Astronomy Picture of the Day. A powerful feature: "You can add a button to your browser's bookmarks toolbar that will create Page2RSS feed for the page you are currently viewing."
posted by nthdegx at 2:18 AM PST - 12 comments