September 26, 2011

Roll Over America Velomobile Tour

Roll Over America: a coast-to-coast mass Velomobile tour. [more inside]
posted by BlooPen at 9:46 PM PST - 9 comments

PJ20TIFF

Perhaps you've managed to see PJ20 during its limited stand in select theaters. Perhaps you'll watch it when it airs on PBS late next month. Either way, you might be interested in seeing the press conference with all five members of the band plus Cameron Crowe [20m32s], the director of the documentary, which took place after the premiere of the film at Toronto International Film Festival. The press conference is also available in downloadable audio format. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:58 PM PST - 56 comments

Mickey Mouse Job

The Ropes at Disney's - 1943 Employee Handbook. The good old days when women got twice as much sick leave, the Penthouse club was accessible by "men only! - sorry gals...", and a violation of the U.S. Espionage Act could get you fired.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:44 PM PST - 53 comments

Consensual Hallucination

Every gamer knows that strange feeling when videogames start bleeding into the real world. Some call it the Tetris Effect (Wiki entry), but a new study calls it 'Game Transfer Phenomena'. Sally Adee argues that this property, which she calls 'everting', could pave the way for a new integration with the Internet and the physical world. (This has nothing to do with this Eversion)
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:36 PM PST - 116 comments

"Don't stand on a corner squeegeeing," [Giuliani] said. "Go to a restaurant. Get a job at a restaurant."

Manhattan's enterprising, unsolicited window cleaners have often been used as squeegee straw men by aspiring (and entrenched) politicians. Mayoral candidate Rudolph Giuliani railed against the squeegee men in his 1993 campaign, but not without empathetically offering them a viable career alternative.

Once a fixture of NYC life, and even the milieu of a major motion picture [SLRottenTomatoes], squeegeesmithy was since relegated to uptown. But, as America's economic windshield has clouded, the squeegee men have returned in force. [more inside]
posted by obscurator at 5:18 PM PST - 73 comments

Blue Movies

Cartoonist Pete Emslie misses colorful color films. [more inside]
posted by Ideefixe at 4:29 PM PST - 55 comments

Death of Wangari Maathai announced.

I am sorry that Wangari Maathai, inspiring Nobel Peace Prize winner famous for tree-planting programme, has died.
posted by maiamaia at 4:21 PM PST - 28 comments

An Evening With American Dad!

An Evening With American Dad! The cast and writing staff of American Dad! sits down at the Paley Center for an hour to discuss the creative process behind the show, the casting process, why Critters sucks, if we'll ever see Roger's home planet, how the recent "Hot Water" episode about a killer hot tub was originally intended to be the series finale, and so much more. [more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 3:25 PM PST - 64 comments

Magic, got it.

What happens when you drop a slinky?
posted by empath at 3:12 PM PST - 83 comments

Moon Camera's Missing Instructions

It's probably too late to take your Hasselblad aboard a Space Shuttle, but if the opportunity arises, read the Astronaut's Photography Manual (PDF) and you might capture photos like this one. Previously.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 2:47 PM PST - 9 comments

Never underestimate a man whose name means "He Who Can Conquer Mountains"

After months of struggle to get his family out of Cuba, Orestes Lorenzo got his response. Raúl Castro, then Minister of the Armed Forces, declared "If he had the balls to steal one my MiGs, then he can come back and get his family himself!" In hindsight, that was probably the wrong thing to say. [more inside]
posted by Cobalt at 2:15 PM PST - 70 comments

No "He said, she said"

No "He said, she said" [more inside]
posted by Jakey at 2:15 PM PST - 25 comments

Bob Cassilly

Bob Cassilly, an industrial artist/sculptor from St. Louis, responsible for revitalization via art, has tragically died in a bulldozer accident while working on his last creation, Cementland.
posted by readyfreddy at 1:27 PM PST - 31 comments

Dallas-Fort Worth Kids' TV Legend Passes

So long Mr. Peppermint Generations of North Texas men and women remember Mr. Peppermint for his three decades of entertaining children. He passed away today. (Entertainment runs in his family).
posted by punkfloyd at 1:03 PM PST - 28 comments

We appreciate your candor

BBC News asks independent trader Alessio Rastani "what would keep investors happy, make them feel more confident?" and gets a surprisingly honest answer: "Personally, it doesn't matter. See, I'm a trader. I don't really care about that kind of stuff. If I see an opportunity to make money, I go with that. So, for most traders, we don't really care that much about how they're going to fix the economy, about how they're going to fix the whole situation; our job is to make money from it. And, personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I have a confession which is I go to bed every night and dream of another recession, I dream of another moment like this." [SLYT]
posted by finite at 12:06 PM PST - 235 comments

NOS OPERTUIT TUNC VERTISSE. ALIQUEM DE VIA CONSULAMUS

Salve! Do you have trouble finding your way from Brindisium to Antium or planning a vacation at your villa in the Appenines because no one produces an online map with directions in good Latin these days? Well, be of good cheer, friend, OmnesViae has what you need. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:56 AM PST - 23 comments

Shadow Cities

Why be the mayor of Starbucks when you can conquer your neighborhood with magic? Shadow Cities is a location-aware MMORPG for your IStuff.
posted by steambadger at 11:26 AM PST - 54 comments

Sequential Dread

There have been many comics adaptations of Lovecraft. These are some of them. (Some images NSFW.) [more inside]
posted by Zed at 10:31 AM PST - 35 comments

Why Oh Why Can't I?

It's been missing from YouTube for almost a year, but finally someone has resurrected the iconic video of Patti Labelle building up to a massive "Over The Rainbow" explosion at a 1984 tribute to MLK Jr.
posted by hermitosis at 10:29 AM PST - 44 comments

*crunch*

'Doritos Creator Dead, to be Buried with Chips.' Arch West, a former Frito-Lay executive and creator of Doritos, will be buried with the chips that made him famous.
posted by Fizz at 9:42 AM PST - 121 comments

Though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide...

Since 1977, Nikon has held a Small World Photomicrography Competition, to showcase that which cannot be seen with the naked eye. This year's winner will be announced in November, but until October 31, we have been invited to vote for one of this years' 115 finalists to receive the 'Small World Popular Vote Award.' [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:49 AM PST - 13 comments

Whoa is me. I'm so Whoa!

The new music video for "Big Wheels" by Toronto pop/rap/rock/fun sextet Down With Webster is a masterpiece of 8-bit animation interwoven seamlessly with live action. [more inside]
posted by 256 at 8:33 AM PST - 11 comments

Fifty years ago today, a whole lot of light bulbs went on

Fifty years ago today, Richard Feynman gave the first of his famous lectures at Caltech. [more inside]
posted by SNACKeR at 8:31 AM PST - 55 comments

1936 Berlin in Farbe

Color footage of 1936 Berlin, in what appears to be a promotional film for the city before the 1936 Olympics. (SLYT)
posted by naturalog at 7:46 AM PST - 90 comments

Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

For much of the time since their discovery in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were the jealously guarded treasure of a select group of scholars. Now, thanks to a partnership between Google and the Israel Museum, five scrolls have been digitized and made available online.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:24 AM PST - 26 comments

Socrates Café

Chris Phillips used to be a journalist and photographer, a public school teacher, and a college instructor with three master’s degrees. Today, at forty, he’s underemployed, deeply in debt, and completely ecstatic about how his life has turned out. While studying for a master of arts in teaching at Montclair State University in 1996, Phillips chanced to pick up Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, the seminal collection of existentialist and proto-existentialist texts that Walter Kaufmann compiled in 1956 as a means of preparing humankind for a genuinely philosophical form of life. Something Phillips read in Kaufmann’s introduction to the book soon sent him rocketing across America, visiting jails, hospices, nursing homes, and other public venues — all on his own dime. “I didn’t have any master plan when I started doing this,” he told me recently. (I’d tracked him down in Baltimore, though he lives now in Scottsdale, Arizona.) “I just had this little idea: Let’s give philosophy back to the people.” [more inside]
posted by cgc373 at 6:30 AM PST - 40 comments

i hope that someone gets my... i hope that someone gets my... i hope that someone gets my...

Over the last two decades, Harold Hackett has sent out over 4,800 messages in a bottle from Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province along the Atlantic coastline. Every message asks for the finder to send a response back to Hackett, and since 1996 he has received over 3,100 responses from all over the world.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:29 AM PST - 46 comments

yes, THROUGH the mountain

Jeb Corliss wingsuits his way through a mountain. Yes, through. (previous wingsuit fun)
posted by allkindsoftime at 2:16 AM PST - 55 comments

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