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John Faherty tells his story of undergoing a pancreas transplant in a bid to cure his type-1 diabetes. [more inside]
posted by soelo at 9:14 PM PST - 33 comments

Here's a song I didn't know existed until summer 2007, when Lemon Jelly's Fred Deakin released an impeccably curated three-CD mix (full 4 hours on Mixcloud). Halfway through the first disc, the music slipped into an easy, loping groove, sunburned and hungover, and a regretful voice offered Otis Blackwell's lonesome lyric: "You know I can be found/ Sitting home all alone …" [Billy Swan's version of "Don't Be Cruel" is] a beautiful record, though, and utterly different from Elvis's 1956 recording. And it opens a fantastic collection of country funk songs, collected and remastered by Zach Cowie of Light in the Attic Records. More sounds below the break. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:13 PM PST - 26 comments

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for changing the admissions criteria of NYC's elite high schools, arguing that relying solely on a single exam (the SHSAT) "creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test prep. However, the reality is just the opposite. It’s not affluent whites, but rather the city’s burgeoning population of Asian-American immigrants — a group that, despite its successes, remains disproportionately poor and working-class — whose children have aced the exam in overwhelming numbers." [more inside]
posted by gemutlichkeit at 9:05 PM PST - 73 comments

Dave's Classic Limousines is dedicated to documenting Limousines prior to the Super-Stretch era and features pictures and descriptions of Custom Coachworks cars and one offs (home built and commercial) plus a page devoted to presidential limos. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 8:21 PM PST - 13 comments

Test Pattern: Downscaling 2997fps 10Min. Reviews are streaming in for Test Pattern: Downscaling 2997fps. Test Pattern: Downscaling 2997fps. Test Pattern: Downscaling 2997fps. Test Pattern: Downscaling 2997fps. Satisfied viewers are saying "Not as good as the book" but still a "A start to finish THRILL RIDE!" and "Deeply. Riveting". It's currently the most popular Netlix movie on Instant Watcher and destined to be a classic.
posted by four panels at 8:16 PM PST - 20 comments

Touching the Art "Ovation’s newest digital series tackles the contemporary art world’s least favorite subject – art. Host Casey Jane Ellison asks her panel of insiders all the dumb questions, so you don’t have to." [more inside]
posted by danabanana at 7:43 PM PST - 4 comments

Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy : What it says on the tin.
posted by bq at 7:35 PM PST - 45 comments

101 Useful Websites is "a frequently updated list of lesser-known but wonderful websites and cool web apps. Here are some of the most useful websites on the internet that you may not know about. These web sites, well most of them, solve at least one problem really well and they all have simple web addresses (URLs) that you can memorize thus saving you a trip to Google." [more inside]
posted by flex at 6:39 PM PST - 20 comments

“San Francisco's Fire Department is one of the few left in the United States that still uses wooden ladders. Each is made by hand at a dedicated workshop. Some have been in rotation for nearly a century.” [more inside]
posted by rtha at 6:11 PM PST - 25 comments

Kali couldn’t hold her gaze. Her eyes rolled back into her head. She had an appointment for 3 p.m., but around noon, Traci called her husband, Joseph. “I got her in, but I don’t know if she’s going to make it that long.” This is the story of how Kali Hardig became the third known survivor of the naegleria fowleri amoeba.
posted by threeants at 6:02 PM PST - 25 comments

"Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing." The language is elegant (homoiconic, multiple-dispatch, consistent and extensible type system), but with easy-to-learn syntax. The standard library includes a wide array of fast and useful functions, and the number of useful packages is growing. [more inside]
posted by vogon_poet at 5:48 PM PST - 34 comments

Could Mario Kart 8 be the Bullet Bill that propels Nintendo's Wii U from its slump? Outstanding reviews, a free game with purchase, plus the Luigi stare of death meme, helped make MK8 the best-selling game in June and boosted Wii U sales tremendously. An arcade version - featuring Fusion Carts - is forthcoming.

Hop over to MetaTalk and share your Nintendo Network ID. [more inside]
posted by porn in the woods at 4:54 PM PST - 75 comments

Bringing Wes home.
How Sound is a podcast on radio storytelling on Public Radio Exchange that focuses on the story behind the radio story, and this episode is called "Bringing Wes home". I'd recommend listening to it cold with no more information than that, but if you'd like to know a bit more, the episode description is below the fold. [more inside]
posted by Lexica at 4:39 PM PST - 2 comments

You Were Made for Loneliness is a Twine text adventure by Tsukareta that explores the idea of love in different situations. Since it's release back in June reviews have been overall positive. [more inside]
posted by chrono_rabbit at 3:53 PM PST - 8 comments

The Real Castaway (2001; 48:13) is a tense and awkward but sometimes beautiful documentary about a teenage boy moving to the Ulithi Atoll and seeking companionship to fulfill a romantic fantasy. [Via.]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:03 PM PST - 3 comments

Person Swap (SLYT) This is one of those "awareness test" things but done more with more of the flare of a magician's trick. There are a lot of interesting details in how they pulled it off. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 2:19 PM PST - 24 comments

A team of geologists and geophysicists have imaged the path of a Pacific Northwest volcano's molten rock, from the subducting slab to the upper crust. [more inside]
posted by Secretariat at 1:32 PM PST - 18 comments

Red Klotz, who led basketball’s biggest losers, the Washington Generals, dies at 93. In his time with the Generals, Mr. Klotz lost at least 14,000 games, or 15,000, or, according to some estimates, more than 20,000. “That sounds about right,” Mr. Klotz would shrug whenever someone tried to calculate the number. “I don’t count the losses,” he told the Washington City Paper in 2007. “It’s easier to keep track of the wins.” Mr. Klotz won six games, his biographer concluded. Or maybe it was four. Possibly just two. But definitely, beyond the shadow of any doubt, his team won one game for sure.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:13 PM PST - 24 comments

Oorutaichi, an electronic musician from Osaka, “makes drifter music, strung through with expert percussion and electric rays, flowing on a river of magical chants, inspired loops and choruses written in an invented language, undiscovered country left and right.” Oorutaichi has several really, really good animated music videos. [more inside]
posted by vathek at 11:27 AM PST - 5 comments

"In my life, I’ve figuratively and literally spent years at one aid station or another. We get hurt and we get injured and we have to do what it takes to recover."
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:24 AM PST - 4 comments

What makes folk even heavier, however, is how much harder it has to work. Volume can be a crutch, and the back-to-basics ethic of folk isn’t anti-technology so much as it’s a reconnection to an older source of power. Without amplifiers cranked to 11, bands like Barren Harvest, Blood And Sun, and Musk Ox carry a different kind of weight: a heaviness of subject, a heaviness of scope, and a heaviness of intensity. More than that, they break free of the pseudo-hillbilly preciousness that folk has been reduced to in this post-O Brother, Where Art Thou? century. That contrast alone is both crushing and liberating.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:36 AM PST - 42 comments

This Woman Has Been Confronting Her Catcallers — And Secretly Filming Their Reactions The videos aren’t meant to highlight specific dramatic confrontations, but the “cumulative daily impact” of street harassment, Lindsey said. Since she began filming, the “only interactions I haven’t been able to capture are car honks.” Earlier this summer, Lindsey began handing out cards to Minneapolis men, explaining what’s wrong with street harassment. (via Buzzfeed). [more inside]
posted by sweetkid at 9:17 AM PST - 269 comments

"A girl has to fight for her rights from the day she's born until the day she dies", explains Nargis. She and her friends bravely spread the message of equality in a country where the hanging and beheading of women remains commonplace. Facing conservative jibes for walking out without head scarves or for driving a car, these girls must also deal with the bigger worry of random terrorist attacks: "Who knows whether we'll be the next victims", they say.
posted by katrielalex at 7:33 AM PST - 11 comments

For certain writers, especially those raised in the 1970s and ’80s, all that time spent in basements has paid off. D&D helped jump-start their creative lives. When he was an immigrant boy growing up in New Jersey, the writer Junot Díaz said he felt marginalized. But that feeling was dispelled somewhat in 1981 when he was in sixth grade. He and his buddies, adventuring pals with roots in distant realms — Egypt, Ireland, Cuba and the Dominican Republic — became “totally sucked in,” he said, by a “completely radical concept: role-playing,” in the form of Dungeons & Dragons. [more inside]
posted by magstheaxe at 7:01 AM PST - 35 comments

For twenty years, the belief that the sex provision was a monkey wrench that unintentionally became part of the machine was the conventional wisdom about Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]. But when scholars—including Michael Gold, Carl Brauer, Cynthia Deitch, Jo Freeman, and Robert Bird—dug into the archives they not only learned that the real story of the sex amendment was quite different; they essentially uncovered an alternative history of women’s rights.

—The Sex Amendment by Louis Menand tells the story of "how women got in on the Civil Rights Act." It focuses especially on the role of the National Women's Party, led by septuagenarian suffragette Alice Paul. Here is a long interview with her which focuses on her activist youth.
posted by Kattullus at 4:35 AM PST - 5 comments

James Garner, star of two classic television shows ("Maverick" and "The Rockford Files") and a wide slate of films including "The Great Escape", "The Americanization of Emily" and "Victor/Victoria", has died at the age of 86.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 3:41 AM PST - 149 comments

They even piped icing onto the birthday cake. SLYT. Previous appearance of birthday guest.
posted by Athanassiel at 12:45 AM PST - 12 comments