MetaFilter

Lord of the Memes : Now that MeFi has taught me how to beat the hipsters, how do I beat the poseurs? David Brooks says "prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser;" the cultural elite are early adopters and, more importantly, early discarders, of culture. [more inside]
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 11:18 PM PST - 70 comments

The owner of a California medical marijuana dispensary has been found guilty of violating federal drug laws. [LA Times] FTA: ...jurors had a clear sense that Lynch was not an ordinary street-corner drug dealer, but the fact that he was dispensing medical marijuana didn't matter under federal law. [...] "It was a tough decision for all of us because the state law and the federal law are at odds." Detailed coverage of the trial by Reason TV. Federal raids on California's medical dispensaries were recently featured on MeFi.
posted by kid ichorous at 10:46 PM PST - 80 comments

Protectors of the Earth. Also, the Hipster Government. All of this courtesy of Your Girlfriend. Via.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:22 PM PST - 6 comments

The Mascot - Complete and Uncut (1933). [Via ECTOPLASMOSIS! and MONSTER BRAINS]
posted by homunculus at 9:50 PM PST - 2 comments

Andre Perkowski has remixed various classic silent films, including The Bat and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to create a silent 1920's version of Batman: Origin Story, Rogues' Gallery.

Also: Adam West in The Dark Knight Returns.
posted by EarBucket at 6:23 PM PST - 11 comments

A SWAT team in Maryland raids a city's mayor's house and kills his dogs. Oh, and the warrant was wrong.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 6:11 PM PST - 118 comments

Thirteen Hundred Rats : a short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle on the importance of choosing your pets. [more inside]
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:32 PM PST - 27 comments

EC Comics great Jack Kamen (probably best known today as the father of inventor Dean Kamen) has died at 88. [more inside]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:26 PM PST - 11 comments

Black Confederates are becoming the subject of a growing argument on what will be the legitimate history of black men in the confederate states. [more inside]
posted by screenname00 at 4:44 PM PST - 64 comments

How many goats are you worth? You've always wondered. Take the quiz and find out.
posted by blue_beetle at 1:53 PM PST - 155 comments

Hummus: The Rap (SLYP) Annoying ironic hipster? Earnest hummus lover? Who cares, hummus deserves phat beats. [more inside]
posted by TungstenChef at 1:28 PM PST - 24 comments

08-08-08 is not only the start of the Olympic games in China. It's also an extremely lucky date, given that the number 8 is considered fortuitous in Chinese culture, being associated with wealth and prosperity. Due to this unlikely (but very lucky) confluence of events, upwards of 9,000 Chinese couples will be getting hitched on 08-08-08. Note that not everybody agrees with the astrological implications of this particular date, but that just sounds like mumbo-jumbo to me. [more inside]
posted by baphomet at 12:19 PM PST - 63 comments

Dude, You Stole My Article They say everyone's a critic, but in this case, the critic is everyone. Today in Slate, Jody Rosen uncovers what just might be "in purely statistical terms ... the greatest plagiarism scandal in the annals of American journalism". Via Stolen from Zoilus.
posted by Paid In Full at 12:19 PM PST - 97 comments

Jimmy's Lost His Toilet Paper is a new independent game from the brilliant creator of Crayon Physics.
posted by cerebus19 at 12:05 PM PST - 16 comments

So you're Roland Emmerich, Hollywood super producer/director, and you buy an apartment in Knightsbridge, London. Friends tell you the neighborhood is a bit "staid." Not caring, you tell your interior decorator to make it so "that when the neighbors peek in, they might want to call the police or something."
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 12:02 PM PST - 84 comments

1984 Soviet animation based on Ray Bradbury's shot story "There Will Come Soft Rains". WARNING: Depressing view on the future of mankind.
posted by Surfin' Bird at 11:50 AM PST - 23 comments

"Once Upon A Time... there were two very special airplanes that lived.... far.... far.... away on a tiny island in the Bering Sea. One was named Rivet Ball and the other was named Rivet Amber. Very few people knew anything about these two planes or the men that flew them. Even family members knew very little. That's because their mission was... TOP SECRET." (some photos and language within are NSFW) [more inside]
posted by kurmbox at 11:35 AM PST - 18 comments

China: Humiliation and the Olympics. Orville Schell discusses China's angry reaction to foreign criticism, the film Dark Matter (based on the 1991 Lu Gang shooting in Iowa), and the Beijing Olympics. ... what gives Dark Matter wider significance is the filmmakers' use of the Iowa incident to explore—indirectly—some important psychological dynamics between China and the West: China's deeply felt sense of historic injury by foreign nations, and the ways its often thwarted efforts to gain acceptance among leading world powers have exacerbated such sentiments. In the past, feelings of injury have arisen from such events as the Opium Wars and the Japanese occupation; and most recently after the Tibetan demonstrations this spring and during the run-up to this summer's Beijing Olympic Games. From the New York Review of Books.
posted by russilwvong at 11:11 AM PST - 41 comments

Viewing Japanese Prints is an encyclopedia of Floating World art (or ukiyo-e) and related genres. It has lots of images to go with the articles. Once you've gone through the site and familiarized yourself with pre-modern Japanese printmaking you might want to browse through the humongous image archive of Tokyo Metropolitan Library. Here are a few images that caught my eye: musicians attempt to keep a lady entertained, samurai pirate jumps into the water, crazed sea-captain wields very big axe, two samurais in combat, elfin man watches split-tailed cat dance while a giant feline stares angrily and giant toad belches up samurai while another samurai fights a gigantic fish and a third samurai observes the action from the banks of a river.
posted by Kattullus at 11:07 AM PST - 15 comments

Mike the headless chicken was a rooster who lived for 18 months after he was beheaded. In that time he grew from 2 1/2 to almost 8 pounds. When the veracity of this was questioned, the owner brought it to the University of Utah to have it's authenticity confirmed.
posted by quin at 11:06 AM PST - 30 comments

Sick and tired of sitting at home, eating a pint of ice cream, watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and wondering why you can't have the success that Kim Kardashian has had? Have you always wondered if you could take her in a fight? Do you need to prove that your butt can take her butt? Well, now you can. [more inside]
posted by Stynxno at 10:27 AM PST - 53 comments

Jerry Clower (Wikipedia article) started telling his funny stories to boost sales when he was a seed and fertilizer salesman. He went on to become a successful comedian and Grand Ole Opry star. [more inside]
posted by Daddy-O at 9:33 AM PST - 17 comments

In a single 1931 document, electrical engineer Alan Blumlein patented stereo records, stereo movie sountracks and surround sound. His equipment was used to make some of the first stereo recordings at EMI's Abbey Road studios - several decades before the technology came into popular use. Blumlein went on to pioneer 405 line TV (the first wholly electronic format which won out over John Logie Baird's rival system) and to produce the equipment that made the first outside TV broadcast possible. At the outbreak of World War 2 he was a key architect of the secret H2S radar project. Unfortunately he was killed in a plane crash while testing the technology and the whole incident was kept secret. Hence he remains an obscure figure despite his achievements. A recent BBC Radio 4 program contains a lot of the archive stereo footage and tells his story.
posted by rongorongo at 9:10 AM PST - 5 comments

In the First Person "is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. It lets you keyword search more than 700,000 pages of full-text by more than 18,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to some 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records." (Description from website.) You can also browse by repository, collection, subject and several other ways.
posted by cog_nate at 9:01 AM PST - 9 comments

The music of the People's Temple. Five years before Jim Jones coerced 900 of his church members to commit suicide in Guyana, the People's Temple cut an album. [more inside]
posted by Bookhouse at 8:36 AM PST - 24 comments

Science Hack is a unique search engine for science videos focusing on Physics, Chemistry, and Space. For example, things to do with sulfur hexafluoride. Still growing, the editors are presently indexing other scientific fields of study including Geology, Psychology, Robotics and Computers. Ever wonder why things go bang?
posted by netbros at 8:11 AM PST - 6 comments

Like Philip K. Dick said, "It's not just 'what if?', it's 'my god, what if?'." By all major accounts, the Zombie War (was | will be) a real bitch. And Fitzpatrick didn't do much better. If some writers have anything to say about it, the future probably wont look too good. Some hit a little close to home. On the other hand, some other writers think our future might be a little brighter. Who knows? It's just a guess. So is looking backwards and wondering "what if?". And if that's not enough, maybe you wonder what it's like to be someone else...
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:05 AM PST - 32 comments

If you've ever wondered which guns were used in a movie, which movies a gun has appeared in, or even which guns an actor has ever used, then the Internet Movie Firearms Database (probably) has you covered. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 7:13 AM PST - 29 comments

Groundviews has posted a collection of writing about the July 1983 and 1958 riots in Sri Lanka. [more inside]
posted by chunking express at 6:28 AM PST - 3 comments

Handy Internet Meme Timeline
posted by allkindsoftime at 4:27 AM PST - 54 comments

While Greyhound pulled their own ad campaign, PETA has created a new ad comparing the Greyhound bus attack last week, outside of Winnipeg, to slaughtering animals.
posted by gman at 4:25 AM PST - 193 comments

Calvin and Jobs.
via Dark Roasted Blend, by way of Gizmodo.
posted by JHarris at 2:07 AM PST - 43 comments

Men in Women-in-Prison [Films]
"This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized — feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream. How this unlikely cathexis occurred, and how it functioned, is the subject of this essay." [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 12:08 AM PST - 23 comments