September 23, 2008

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A photo-essay of life in a Cambodian Aids Ward. [images are distressing] [more inside]
posted by hadjiboy at 11:07 PM PST - 7 comments

Obama's Got Options, Baby.

Maybe America needs Barack more than Barack needs America... It's got to be tough being Barack Obama these days. Just managing to hang onto a slim lead in the polls against a truly horrifying Republican ticket - after eight years in which a Republican administration has all but destroyed the nation. Having to explain to people over and over again that no, he's really not a Muslim, and people still don't believe him. Sarah Palin. Maybe America isn't worth Barack's trouble. Maybe there's other fish in the sea, America. Maybe you ought to think about that a little and stop being this way. Canada has an election coming up too, and given what they've got to work with, more and more Canadians are starting to take a hard look south of the border.
posted by Naberius at 10:54 PM PST - 78 comments

Aubergine (eggplant) recipes

Ashbury's Aubergines has a collection of over 3000 eggplant recipes, sorted by ingredient and cuisine.
posted by Upton O'Good at 8:05 PM PST - 24 comments

Gas Free

Gas Shortages Throughout the Southeast More than a week after Hurricane Ike, there's little or no gas around much of the American Southeast. [more inside]
posted by mygothlaundry at 6:52 PM PST - 86 comments

Mixtube: YouTube mixtapes

Mixtube allows users to create online playlists of songs on YouTube, and play those assembled by others. Both mixing and playing have a nice simple interface. Here's one I took a few minutes to make.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 5:28 PM PST - 14 comments

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!

50 Greatest Villains In Literature
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:11 PM PST - 140 comments

sample videos for Nikon D90 and Canon 5D MkII

Exciting things are happening on the DSLR market: both the new Nikon D90 and Canon 5D MII can shoot video and now the first real footage is becoming available on the web: Chase Jarvis showcased the D90 a bit back and now Vincent Laforet demonstrates what the 5D MII is capable of (more on his blog, including behind-the-scenes footage) Laforet predicts these cameras will change the landscape rather rapidly: You can use your prime and zoom lenses (...) with it - and shoot wide open… so you can shoot films with fisheye lenses, 50mm 1.2 as well as the 200mm f2 or 400mm 2.8 that you may already own… [more inside]
posted by krautland at 2:45 PM PST - 109 comments

Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove

In Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, Kristan Horton imitates the satirical movie Dr. Strangelove and creates a new world for the film—silverware become an airplane, plastic and coffee grounds become the sky. [via]
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 2:18 PM PST - 12 comments

Michael Moores latest film free online

Michael Moore's newest movie Slacker Uprising is available for free download, the "first major major film to be released in such a way," according to the Associated Press. "This film, really isn't for anybody other than the choir," said Moore. "But that's because I believe the choir needs a song to sing every now and then." [more inside]
posted by stbalbach at 2:17 PM PST - 42 comments

Baghdad Nights

Baghdad nights: evaluating the US military ‘surge’ using nighttime light signatures (PDF). A team of UCLA geographers using satellite imagery to track the amount of light emitted in Baghdad at night found that electricity use in Sunni neighborhoods fell prior to the surge and never returned, indicating that ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias drove the Sunnis away before the surge began and was largely responsible for the subsequent decrease in violence. [Via Passport]
posted by homunculus at 2:12 PM PST - 33 comments

?!??zone (NSFW)

NSFW: [The new EA game Spore] + [Your naturally lecherous, lascivious, lewd, libidinous imagination] = Sporn!
posted by not_on_display at 1:36 PM PST - 52 comments

Evolution : Gorilla to Monkey

Damon Albarn’s career reads like a roadmap to some musical no-man's land: start a pop band, turn into an indie/hip-hop/dub “virtual” group, followed by a supergroup featuring Tony Allen and Paul Simonon, and throw in an album of Malian guitar music for good measure. [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 12:21 PM PST - 25 comments

Project Blinkenlights Toronto: Stereoscope

Remote control Toronto's City Hall by iPhone during Octobre 4th Nuit blanche. Project Blinkenlights will again transform a huge building into a computer display. This time 960 windows of Toronto's City Hall. Everybody can submit animations to be shown and there will be client programms for iPhone and OSX to receive the signal and interact with the installation. Watch the previous installations in Berlin [Mefi thread] and Paris [Mefi thread] on Google Video.
posted by meikel at 11:20 AM PST - 16 comments

Deportation's not the worst that could happen

For nearly 20 years, Hessamddin Norani and wife Sedige Khazravi have run a small convenience store in North Buffalo, working 15 1/2-hour days, seven days a week. The couple face deportation if their request for asylum is rejected by an Immigration Court judge. [more inside]
posted by jdfan at 11:19 AM PST - 59 comments

Strongbad's 200th Email

Happy Bicentenemail. Strongbad answers his 200th email in this installment of the long-running Homestarrunner.com web site. Featuring a musical intro by They Might Be Giants.
posted by justkevin at 10:45 AM PST - 46 comments

Libor in the LRB

"The calculation of Libor is co-ordinated by just two people, who work in an unremarkable open-plan office in London’s Docklands .. They do this electronically, but sometimes the co-ordinators make a phone call to a bank that hasn’t sent in its estimates, and if the latter seem implausible – typos, for example, are fairly common – they’re checked, also with a quick call: ‘Hi there, is the Kiwi chap [provider of the estimates for borrowing New Zealand dollars] about? . . . Bit of a spread on the two month. Everyone else is coming in a good bit under that.’" Calculating the Libor and how London became the center of the international money markets, from the LBR.
posted by geoff. at 9:45 AM PST - 12 comments

The Waldo Ultimatum

The Waldo Ultimatum
posted by feelinglistless at 9:35 AM PST - 37 comments

Man of steel, woman of retcon, kid of non-existence

Superman rebooted! - The next Superman movie will be ignoring 2006’s Superman Returns, something that has been suggested by comic book writers when asked how to save the franchise. Mark Millar has his own idea of what Superman needs: Mark Millar.
posted by Artw at 9:24 AM PST - 132 comments

Your favorite conductor sucks.

“Another Rosenberg Executed”? Classical music critic Donald Rosenberg may be the reigning expert on the Cleveland Orchestra, having written an entire book on the esteemed ensemble. But failure to fawn over conductor Franz Welser Most has gotten him booted off his newspaper’s classical music beat. People are beginning to notice… [more inside]
posted by Faze at 9:13 AM PST - 19 comments

"Merkle's Boner," 100 years later

One hundred years ago today, September 23, 1908, the Chicago Cubs played the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. In one of the best seasons in baseball history, the two teams were in a hot pennant race - separated by one game with two weeks left in the season. What happened next is one of the most famous blunders (if it even was a blunder) in baseball history. [more inside]
posted by AgentRocket at 8:53 AM PST - 30 comments

DEAR COMRADE!

Soviet Music "You are browsing a resource which is devoted first of all to the history and culture of the Soviet Union, the country which the West for a long time usually named as "The Empire of Evil", the country to which some people in the West perceive as "something big and snowy". I offer you to try to look outside the frames of usual stereotypes, to try to understand life of a unique country, with its interesting history, beautiful culture and miraculous relations between people. The music submitted on this site - is an evident sample of a totally new culture, which completely differs from all that, with what Hollywood and MTV supply us so much. This culture, being free from the cult of money, platitude, violence and sex, was urged to not indulge low bents of a human soul but to help the person to become culturally enriched and to grow above himself." [more inside]
posted by tellurian at 8:38 AM PST - 16 comments

beastlies

Sculpted Beastlies (A flickr set, via)
posted by dhruva at 8:15 AM PST - 12 comments

Homesoft's Disk Images of Atari 8-bit Games

Homesoft's Disk Images. 354 disks full of 8-bit Atari games. Click on game titles for screenshots. [more inside]
posted by milquetoast at 7:55 AM PST - 13 comments

"I can name that tune in 300 yards..."

"I can name that tune in 300 yards ..." Not for much longer, though. Honda prepared for an upcoming commercial by cutting grooves in a road in Lancaster, California. These grooves, if driven over at just the right speed and in just the right car (one guess!) should play something resembling the William Tell Overture. But once filming was done (and I'm sure the commerical will be as impeccably produced and successful as Honda's other ads), locals and tourists were left with the driver's equivalent of that huge floor keyboard in Big, with some drivers lining up to play over and over again. Result? The city will pave over the road today. But hey, we'll always have Anyang. And Japan (previously). And Denmark.
posted by maudlin at 6:10 AM PST - 29 comments

Mississippi Fred McDowell

When the Rolling tones recorded an old blues tune called You Gotta Move on Sticky Fingers back in 1971, it was another instance of a tune by an old black man, known only to blues aficionados, suddenly becoming part of the consciousness of a gazillion people who probably never would've heard it otherwise. But let's pay a little visit to the man who originally wrote and recorded the song, Mississippi Fred McDowell, shall we? Here's a jumping version of Shake 'em On Down, his haunting Going Down to the River, the gospel blues of When I Lay My Burden Down, Highway 61, My Babe (you'll note the similarity to "This Train"), Louise, and his version of the American folk/blues standard John Henry. And don't miss the beautiful 1969 documentary featuring McDowell at Internet Archive, Blues Maker, which features some superlative acoustic performances, and footage of the people and environment of the Mississippi delta country.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:00 AM PST - 40 comments

Comic strips translated into Middle English.

Japes for Owre Tymes is a blog that translates one newspaper comic strip a day into Middle English. "Why? Because it can..." If you want to try reading the translated strips but need a bit of help here's a Middle English dictionary.
posted by Kattullus at 5:14 AM PST - 16 comments

Buy My Sh*t Pile, Henry!

Buy My Sh*t Pile, Henry! With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their "distressed assets", i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we'd give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government...
posted by jim in austin at 5:05 AM PST - 47 comments

MacArthur's new fellows

2008 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grants announced. Probably the biggest name is the New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross. [more inside]
posted by mattbucher at 4:41 AM PST - 80 comments

This one's for the history nerds

The Brothers Warner premiering nationally via PBS this week. From Rin Tin Tin to Eastwood, the story of the original Hollywood independent filmmakers.
posted by ms.jones at 4:34 AM PST - 6 comments

Ponzi Scheme, Credit Default Swaps in 2004 vs. 2008

"As no rational agent would be willing to take part in the last round in a finite economy, it is difficult to design Ponzi schemes that are certain to explode. This paper argues that if agents correctly believe in the possibility of a partial bailout when a gigantic Ponzi scheme collapses, and they recognize that a bailout is tantamount to a redistribution of wealth from non-participants to participants, it may be rational for agents to participate, even if they know that it is the last round. We model a political economy where an unscrupulous profit-maximizing promoter can design gigantic Ponzi schemes to cynically exploit this "too big to fail" doctrine." [more inside]
posted by Rafaelloello at 3:46 AM PST - 59 comments

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