MetaFilter

Jerry Seinfeld is a Lazy Hack Out of Touch with the Real World - and Who Can Blame Him? Paste Magazine's brief riposte to the New Yorker's Jerry Seinfeld interview in which Mr. It's About Nothing feels that comedy has been killed by "the extreme left" and "P.C. crap."
posted by Kitteh on Apr 30 at 8:19 AM - 93 comments

JZD Slušovice was a collective farm established in 1952 in the village of Slušovice in the south east of Czechia, at the time in central Czechoslovakia. When 27 year old František Čuba was appointed chairman of the coöperative in 1963, he decided to use the pretext that the farmland wasn't productive as a reason to branch out into alternative. And so, over the next 25 years the small village turned into an industrial powerhouse, developing amongst other things, a holiday resort and the first Czechoslovak Personal Computer. [more inside]
posted by ambrosen on Apr 30 at 8:19 AM - 3 comments

A Doctor at Cigna Said Her Bosses Pressured Her to Review Patients’ Cases Too Quickly. Cigna Threatened to Fire Her. Nurses in the Phillipines are doing the initial reviews, and making major mistakes. Cigna wants their reviewing doctors to take about four minutes to check the reviews and decide if warranted, or if it should be approved, and penalizing doctors who do the work to know what's really going on. [more inside]
posted by mephron on Apr 30 at 6:41 AM - 36 comments

Kiwi takes a nap in Far North woman's chicken coop (New Zealand/Aotearoa).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 30 at 4:07 AM - 22 comments

Even as stars among her contemporaries have faded into relative obscurity, Niedecker's poetry pitched resolutely between — between avant-garde experimentalism and ethnopoetics, between the gnomic and the manifest — has sustained, across the decades, stalwart devotion. Her position within the canon of twentieth-century American modernism may seem to be in flux, shifting between various contexts — Objectivism and ecopoetics, white settler colonialism, geological and geopolitical history, the artistic legacies of the New Deal and the Popular Front, midcentury feminism, Thoreauvian hermeticism transplanted to the Midwest. Her work can feel both elusive and profusive, her poetic evolution traced across fugitive volumes produced by tiny presses and now appearing in Selecteds and Collecteds rife with textual variations. In our attempts to locate Lorine Niedecker, we do not seek to pin her down but rather to let loose the frustrating delights and joyful contradictions of her art. from Locating Lorine Niedecker by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick [more inside]
posted by chavenet on Apr 30 at 1:26 AM - 2 comments

WDR BIG BAND - The Prince Experience | Konzert [1h40m] "The WDR BIG BAND plays the music of PRINCE together with internationally renowned guests Liv Warfield (vocals), Cassandra O'Neal (vocals, keyboard), Ricky Peterson (Hammond B3), Paul Peterson (vocals, bass), Mike Scott (E -guitar), Kirk Johnson (drums) and Luis Ribeiro (percussion). Vince Mendoza, Composer in Residence of the WDR BIG BAND since 2016, has specially arranged PRINCE's compositions for the WDR BIG BAND. The concert was recorded live during the Bonn Jazz Festival (August 2023)." Song list in video description." [more inside]
posted by hippybear on Apr 29 at 2:54 PM - 13 comments

The Book of Miracles unfolds in chronological order divine wonders and horrors, from Noah’s Ark and the Flood at the beginning to the fall of Babylon the Great Harlot at the end; in between this grand narrative of providence lavish pages illustrate meteorological events of the sixteenth century. In 123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another. Vivid with cobalt, aquamarine, verdigris, orpiment, and scarlet pigment, they depict numerous phantasmagoria: clouds of warriors and angels, showers of giant locusts, cities toppling in earthquakes, thunder and lightning. Against dense, richly painted backgrounds, the artist or artists’ delicate brushwork touches in fleecy clouds and the fiery streaming tails of comets. There are monstrous births, plagues, fire and brimstone, stars falling from heaven, double suns, multiple rainbows, meteor showers, rains of blood, snow in summer. [...] Its existence was hitherto unknown, and silence wraps its discovery; apart from the attribution to Augsburg, little is certain about the possible workshop, or the patron for whom such a splendid sequence of pictures might have been created.

The Augsburg Book of Miracles: a uniquely entrancing and enigmatic work of Renaissance art, available as a 13-minute video essay, a bound art book with hundreds of pages of trilingual commentary, or a snazzy Wikimedia slideshow of high-resolution scans.
posted by Rhaomi on Apr 29 at 11:53 AM - 15 comments

A team of cavers helped rescue a 50,000-year-old kangaroo fossil.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 29 at 8:35 AM - 13 comments

A Series of Headaches is a video from the London Review of Books following printer Nick Hand as he prints a page from the magazine using methods as close as he can get to those used to print the First Folio of Shakespeare plays. The page selected is an old LRB article about the First Folio by Michael Dobson [archive link]. The video is made in conjunction with Folio400, a website with lots of information about the First Folio, as well as a series of articles on it.
posted by Kattullus on Apr 29 at 8:29 AM - 11 comments

After WB's success with Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, there was Freakazoid!. Originally conceived by Bruce Timm as a straight laced superhero gig, Steven Spielberg kept pressing it to be more and more zany. How zany? Get your freak on with every episode at the Internet Archive, or talk about anything you like, it's your Monday morning FREE THREAD. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett on Apr 29 at 5:50 AM - 88 comments

By all appearances, Widell certainly seemed to be thriving. She took business lunches at Mahogany Prime Steakhouse, a leading Tulsa destination. She was a member of the Summit Club — "Downtown Tulsa's Only Private Social Club" — perched atop the Bank of America Center, with its panoramic views of the Arkansas River. She hobnobbed with the local elite and claimed to have more Airbnb listings than anyone else in the city. She cut her hair short and, to her husband's annoyance, swapped out her conservative style for big sunglasses and more "flamboyant" fashions. Widell, who hadn't had much growing up, also projected an image of benevolence. She made a point of hiring people with criminal records to work in her warehouse, and she talked about buying a church that had just come on the market and turning it into a women's shelter. But then investors started asking questions. And soon enough, Widell would be turning on the very people she'd promised a second chance. from The fall of the Queen of Airbnb
posted by chavenet on Apr 29 at 1:44 AM - 29 comments

Strippers' bill of rights bill signed into law in Washington state. The new law requires training for employees in establishments to prevent sexual harassment, identify and report human trafficking, de-escalate conflict and provide first aid. It also mandates security workers on site, keypad codes on dressing rooms and panic buttons in places where entertainers may be alone with customers. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 28 at 8:22 PM - 30 comments

The Crucial Role of Herbaria in Science by Dr. Cassandra Quave. Podcast episode (on Youtube) includes Dr. Quave's WaPo opinion piece. In February, Duke University announced that it was shuttering its herbarium, to widespread dismay from scientists across the globe. With one of the nation's largest collections of algae, lichens, fungi, and mosses, Duke's herbarium is "highly unusual" for its depth and variety. It's also where the Lady Gaga Fern is held, named for the artist's outfit at the 2010 Grammys which looked exactly like the sexual stage of a fern gametophyte.
posted by spamandkimchi on Apr 28 at 6:42 PM - 6 comments

Entertainment Made By North Korea [5h30m] is an overview of... entertainment made by North Korea. It begins well before the founding of the country to give the cultural background, and then gets into post-Korean War entertainment. It's an interesting history lesson combined with a fascinating glimpse into a world not seen much outside it's own borders. [more inside]
posted by hippybear on Apr 28 at 3:43 PM - 14 comments

Enty’s Hollywood was a dark and messy world, uglier and more menacing than the glamorous town imagined by outsiders. The authenticity of this vision — and, in turn, the authenticity of his scoops — was bolstered by how pathetic he came across in his own accounts. Enty described himself as a 300-pound heavy-drinking entertainment lawyer who had been married six times, lived in his parents’ basement in L.A., and was bullied by his famous clientele — a zhlub with the right connections and a nose for dirt. In reality, Nelson didn’t live in his parents’ basement, and he hasn’t been married six times — only three. from The Man Who Gossiped Too Much [Vulture; ungated] [CW: well, almost everything]
posted by chavenet on Apr 28 at 12:56 PM - 6 comments

For more than two years, the world of lost media has been flummoxed by 17 seconds of grainy audio uploaded to a small name-that-song site. Tentatively titled "Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives)" based on the apparent lyrics, the clip's energetic retro 80s vibes defied all attempts by music ID apps and various hive-minds to track it down, soon becoming the holy grail of the "lostwave" community of enthusiasts for obscure unidentified "rare grooves." The search inspired articles, video essays, Youtube and TikTok memes, ambitious reconstructions (including multiple music videos), and whole wikis, but the song itself remained unsolved... until now. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Apr 28 at 12:52 PM - 24 comments

Yangyang Cheng explores the historical evolution of how we think about science, its capitalization, politicization, and securitization, & how the US' competition with China is restricting the future of scientific research:

"To understand the present woes in scientific collaboration between the United States and China and to conceive of a better future, one must go back in time to trace the evolution of this transpacific relationship."

posted by ndr on Apr 28 at 3:59 AM - 3 comments

For generations of science fiction and fantasy aficionados, saying the name Harlan Ellison is like uttering a dark spell. Ellison’s writing — primarily in short story format — is fantastic and provocative, but his reputation for contentiousness was equally potent, often overshadowing the art itself. And for younger genre fans, the name Harlan Ellison might not mean anything at all. If you’re into science fiction and fantasy and came of age in the new millennium (and his 2014 Simpsons cameo went over your head), there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Ellison. from The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison [more inside]
posted by chavenet on Apr 28 at 1:50 AM - 90 comments

Extensive Desert Lava Tubes Sheltered Humans for 7000 Years, Archaeologists Find. Formed after volcanic activity, the underground caves periodically hosted early humans and their livestock in Saudi Arabia, facilitating cultural exchange.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 27 at 10:50 PM - 10 comments

Bryats Band. 'Vesnyanka' українська Інді-фолк (slyt. 3:44)
posted by clavdivs on Apr 27 at 5:49 PM - 3 comments