MetaFilter

Great cache of interesting you tube clips including Alex Chilton, Paula Abdul stoned, The Pogues and James Brown drunk, Husker Du, John Lennon, and Captain Beefheart. And when was the last time you read something worthwhile on a music blog? Check out the Susan Choi post at moistworks. [And bonus essay from mefite gwint's wife!]
posted by vronsky at 11:35 PM PST - 26 comments

Disapproving Rabbits! Maybe they disapprove of the war in Iraq. Maybe they disapprove of abortion. Maybe they disapprove of Ann Coulter. Maybe they disapprove of Ann Coulter going to Iraq to have an abortion. But I'm quite sure they disapprove of this post.
posted by Salmonberry at 8:59 PM PST - 36 comments

The Crying Game. The Japanese proverb Naku ko wa sodatsu says that "A crying child thrives." During the annual Konaki Sumo ("Crying Sumo") festival held at certain temples in Japan, babies are held facing each other and encouraged to cry by priests and sumo wrestlers. The one who bawls first, or loudest, is the winner, thought to be blessed by the gods with good health.
posted by gottabefunky at 7:48 PM PST - 29 comments

Meet Mark Penn. Pollster to Hillary Clinton and Corporate America. Penn came up with terms like "Soccer Moms" and "Office Park Dads", and if you're reading metafilter you're probably an e-fluential (you can take a quiz to find out. And don't forget about the momfluentials! Oh, and remember, when talking about the war, don't ever use the word mistake. Hillary Isn't)
posted by delmoi at 7:29 PM PST - 32 comments

The David Lynch Foundation via the man himself will announce, on May 1st, at 12 noon (EDT), the foundation's plan to stop school violence. Their plan? Teaching students how to meditate.
posted by jasonspaceman at 6:50 PM PST - 61 comments

The website of London's Design Museum contains a wealth of resources. Explore the illustrated history of architecture and design, from the Anglepoise lamp to Buckminster Fuller. Read an interview with Dan Houser of Rockstar Games. Ponder the evolution of the humble chair.
posted by nasreddin at 4:19 PM PST - 4 comments

To celebrate the 17^th birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope, please feast your eyes on a very detailed (Flash) picture of the Carina Nebula.
posted by WolfDaddy at 4:18 PM PST - 27 comments

A 360 degree view in 71 photos of Will Self's writing room. Damn, that's a lot of post-its. (related)
posted by Ufez Jones at 3:38 PM PST - 28 comments

Is my penis too small? Am I gay? What does ______ mean? Sensible, snark-free* sex advice and information from the practical to the spiritual. Plus, links galore and, sex advice for teens. *Although in that particular link, no longer updated and near-impossible to search by topic
posted by serazin at 3:30 PM PST - 27 comments

Two wheels, no brakes, no gears... Unstoppable. They're fixed-gear bicycles, and they're an environmentally friendly mode of transportation for those with a sense of style (or a death wish).
posted by buriednexttoyou at 2:50 PM PST - 161 comments

The Sea Organ (YouTube) is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first pipe organ that is played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 pipes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played (YouTube). The waves create random harmonic sounds.
posted by nickyskye at 1:43 PM PST - 46 comments

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb is out. Reviews in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and Financial Times. Just in time with those of us with a love of Hume's problem of induction, non-Gaussian distributions and financial intellectualism. Read an early draft of chapter 16, The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud. Read Taleb's "philisophical and literary notebook." Then, in a feat of metanarrative rarely seen outside of Metatalk, read his comments on comments on the book. Previously on Metafilter: Languagehat has already made his thoughts on Taleb known, it wasn't pretty, and someone with "vested interests in Taleb" responded. Taleb, refreshingly, does not shy away from debates about his work.
posted by geoff. at 12:50 PM PST - 65 comments

Baseball fans were treated on Sunday to the rarest gem in the sport, a confluence of chance and circumstance which had only occurred twelve times previously in modern major league history. If you blinked, you may have missed it. Colorado Rockies rookie shortshop (and subject of future trivia questions) Troy Tulowitzki turned an unassisted triple play.
posted by edverb at 12:37 PM PST - 87 comments

Stephen Elliott describes life without the internet.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 11:19 AM PST - 80 comments

Demonstrate one of the weirdest quantum effects in your home using a laser pointer, some tinfoil, a piece of wire, and a $7 polarizer. The device, called a quantum eraser, operates in a way very similar to the famously mind-blowing double slit experiment that was voted the most beautiful experiment in physics.
posted by blahblahblah at 11:16 AM PST - 48 comments

The guy over at Make Your Nut is facing a dilemma I've wondered about myself: what to do about the security risks that are inherent in the many RFID-chipped credit and ATM cards that banks are so keen on issuing today? There's a lot of evidence out there that indicates that the highly personal information these cards (and the new US passports as well) carry can be stripped away by a thief with a little motivation and access to relatively low-cost equipment. You can go with the nifty RFID-blocking wallets (discussed here previously), or, according to some, you could just grab a hammer.
posted by shiu mai baby at 8:26 AM PST - 26 comments

Peak Performance is a website featuring dozens of articles on just about every aspect of sports science, including large sections devoted to cycling, swimming and sports psychology. Some of my own favorites deal with the beneficial effects of Omega-3 fatty acids, the Chinese government’s plan to dominate the Olympics, Veronique Billat’s 30-30 running workouts and how to increase growth hormone levels naturally.
posted by jason's_planet at 8:19 AM PST - 13 comments

How to conduct a job interview. 5 steps to conducting good job interviews and finding the right candidates. Contains answers to the infamous why is a manhole cover round question. Also, 10 common mistakes managers should avoid when conducting same. On the flispide, here are some tips for interview preparation, the 25 most difficult questions an interviewee can prepare for and some things to avoid saying in interviews.
posted by psmealey at 6:04 AM PST - 52 comments

20ltd.com is a new and unique online shop. They have 20 limited edition items for sale at any time, and each item is a limited edition made exclusively for 20ltd.com. And they have a jukebox with some great tunes on to shop by.
posted by allkindsoftime at 2:50 AM PST - 48 comments

Let's take a moment to consider that humblest of American musical instruments, the cigar box guitar. Many of the most important names in American guitar artistry got their start on the unprepossessing little instrument. And let's not forget its cousin, the cookie tin banjo. By the time you've heard some of those boxy tones you might just want to join the growing legions of players and make one of your own. Not the DIY type? There are lots of folks out there who'll make one for you. And friends, don't forget to pay a visit to the National Cigar Box Guitar Museum, and tell 'em flapjax sent'cha! In closing, if you've got a big stack of cigar boxes but none of this guitar stuff piques your interest, you can always try this.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:05 AM PST - 30 comments

The Beltane Fire Society Fire Festival. Happy Beltane! [Some links NSFW.]
posted by homunculus at 12:15 AM PST - 23 comments

Being the adventures and observations of a field naturalist and an animal photographer - An utterly charming picture of life in Scotland's Outer Hebrides in 1896.

St Kilda - "Many theories have been advanced as to the origin of the inhabitants of this lonely rock, and a curious tradition exists as to its acquisition by members of the outside world. The inhabitants of Harris and Uist agreed to make it the prize for a boat race, and accordingly set out to row across the intervening waste of waters. So equally matched were the crews in regard to pluck and endurance that they arrived at St Kilda almost at the same moment. The Uist men, however, led by a few strokes, and hopes of winning ran high amongst them when Colla MacLeod, the chief of the Harris gang, chopped his left hand off and flung it ashore over the heads of his competitors, and secured St Kilda and its satellites to himself and his descendants for all time."

posted by tellurian at 11:02 PM PST - 7 comments

“I never think of my age,” she said. “We don’t die at a certain age. And if people didn’t know they were getting a certain age, maybe the same age their father died or their mother died, I think they’d be better off.”

Nola Ochs, 95, will soon become the oldest person to graduate from college, according to Guinness World Records.
posted by Brittanie at 9:26 PM PST - 18 comments

"It's a great thing about this government ... the only people that ever stand up and tell the truth are who? Intelligence officers." George Tenet told his side on 60 Minutes tonight. In case you missed it. [via]
posted by scblackman at 8:44 PM PST - 60 comments

Llaguno bridge is a documentary offering an alternative point of view on some of the violent events that took place in Venezuela during the coup d'etat attempt of 2002 [1]. Some local private television are accused of deliberatedly picking some facts in an attempt to support the ongoing coup ; different videos taken from different angles show how some people were wrongly accused of shooting at unarmed masses of demonstrators. Regardless of political preferences and actual events, it is an interesting documentary on how easily facts can be misrepresented.
posted by elpapacito at 7:08 PM PST - 8 comments

The Maoist internationalist movement is youtubery at its best, feel free to see what should have been the actual stone roses video, stalin visits berlin,moloko bring it back. elsewhere, one becomes aware of the new order.
posted by sgt.serenity at 5:41 PM PST - 19 comments

Bill Moyers interviewed Jon Stewart on April 27. The video is on the Moyers' soon-to-be great new site.
posted by McGuillicuddy at 5:04 PM PST - 66 comments

Is it a wok?! An UFO?! No, it's The Hang Drum! With its distinct serene sound, Hang, as it's also called ("Hand" in Swiss German), was created in 2000 in Switzerland by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer after years of research. It's a versatile instrument that can be customized to produce many different musical scales. Want one yourself? Unfortunately, only a few are custom-made each year by Rohner and Schärer. More Hang music? Listen to the Hang radio station. More: videos | music | known artists | a beautiful Hang used by musician Alan Tower
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:01 PM PST - 28 comments

Roads To Riches (or We've Got a Bridge in Brooklyn to Sell You--Seriously) -- Why investors are clamoring to take over America's highways, bridges, and airports—and why the public should be nervous.--...a slew of Wall Street firms—Goldman, Morgan Stanley, the Carlyle Group, Citigroup, and many others—is piling into infrastructure ... Assets sold now could change hands many times over the next 50 years, with each new buyer feeling increasing pressure to make the deal work financially. It's hardly a stretch to imagine service suffering in such a scenario; already, the record in the U.S. has been spotty. ...
posted by amberglow at 4:49 PM PST - 107 comments

Brass Eye is a hilarious & much missed British parody of "issue" news programs such as 60 Minutes in the U.S. It ran for one year, in 1997 (minus the 2001 special), and only six episodes were produced. Thanks to the miracle of the internets, all six (Animals, Drugs, Science, Sex, Crime & Moral Decline) are available in their entirety via Google Video. If you're unfamiliar with the series, trust me, it's not to be missed. Previous mentions on Metafilter. Discovered Via the good mr hodgman's blog.
posted by jonson at 2:57 PM PST - 48 comments

Melted Freeway
posted by serazin at 1:23 PM PST - 86 comments

Orion Magazine hosts a two-part essay on the environmentalism movement's attempts to fit within free market capitalism, and the problems therein. Part one, The Idols of Environmentalism, focuses on the cross purposes of capitalism and environmentalism, and the apparent impossibility of the two working together. In part two, The Ecology of Work, the focus is on the human impact of the work and consumption culture.
posted by knave at 12:48 PM PST - 27 comments

[scifilter] Scientists use a supercomputer to simulate a biological neural structure "as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain"
posted by delmoi at 9:43 AM PST - 48 comments

Foldschool offers free downloadable PDF patterns you can use to make children's furniture and "fun objects" out of 4mm corrugated cardboard. via
posted by paulsc at 8:13 AM PST - 5 comments

Why waste time on playing roleplaying games or writing pastiches when you can actually worship Cthulhu? Join an existing Cthulhu cult or form your own!. They've got a book and everything! (though it may contain big chunks of wiki-plagarism). As ever, the ability to rock a traditionalist shaved-head-and-goatee satanist look considered a plus.
posted by Artw at 8:06 AM PST - 32 comments

New York Magazine's top five shorts from the Tribeca Film Festival, presented in full, including the 25-minute documentary "Someone Else's War," about third-world contract employees in Iraq. A bit more inside. [via Nerve's Screengrab]
posted by mediareport at 7:28 AM PST - 6 comments

Fugazi on the web: Instrument excerpts, "Suggestion," "Waiting Room," "Shut the Door," "Reclamation," "Long Division," and much more. (previously 1, 2)
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:05 AM PST - 36 comments

Selected Cartoon Introductions from the 1980s [YouTube]
posted by BeerFilter at 6:39 AM PST - 69 comments

The Wu-Tang Clan presents 215 mp3s. (via)
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:13 AM PST - 43 comments

On November 29, 1864, John Chivington led the Colorado Volunteers in a dawn attack in which at least 150 Cheyenne men, women and children were slaughtered (many of their corpses grotesquely mutilated), bringing a new wave of Indian-white conflict to Colorado's high plains along the Santa Fe Trail. The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site was officially dedicated today. See photos of some of the people involved, read some contemporary propaganda concerning the event, as well as actual testimony from witnesses and perpetrators.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:56 PM PST - 17 comments

MEDgle, a personalized medical search engine.
posted by nickyskye at 9:13 PM PST - 18 comments

Pi to 1,000 places on piano is just one of the many catchy tunes on math sonifications. And check out more interesting things on on artist Tom Dukich's site.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:59 PM PST - 27 comments

The photography of Manuel Libres Librodo. He photographs beautiful women. Children. Monks. Blind old ladies. Light. Souls. But mostly, beautiful women.
posted by andihazelwood at 7:20 PM PST - 19 comments

Hip hop history— It's the Rub! Along with a handful of other shows, Brooklyn hip hop lovers The Rub compile a history of hip hop. Eleven parts through 1989.
posted by klangklangston at 6:56 PM PST - 14 comments

"Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?" Senator Gravel keeps them honest in the democratic debate
posted by petsounds at 5:25 PM PST - 139 comments

Are you about to do some time in a California jail, but feel that people of your quality shouldn't have to mix with the other inmates? For just $82 a day, you don't have to! I suspect it's an extension of that classic Clinton-era program.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:58 PM PST - 99 comments

Crime Stoppers (motto: get paid to snitch!) is the Yang to the Stop Snitchin' (motto: stop snitchin!) campaign's Yin. This commercial, which I'm relatively convinced is not a parody, best illustrates the consumer value proposition behind crime stoppers.
posted by jonson at 1:36 PM PST - 21 comments

"First of all, it's a map; second, it's a piece of art." Look closely at the corner of a North American ski resort trail map and you will probably see James Niehues' name tucked away in the trees. Examples of his work include Alta, Snow Basin, Winter Park, Killington and Vail.
posted by mmascolino at 1:36 PM PST - 17 comments

"Someone in a Tree" -- an incedibly rare video from the original, 1976 production of "Pacific Overtures." I grew up listening to an L.P. of these same people perform this same song, but I've never before seen them perform it. I grew up in Southern Indiana, so actually seeing a Broadway show was out of the question. But I loved this song, and -- years later -- I read that it was Stephen Sondheim's favorite of all the songs he ever wrote. Today, I found this video on YouTube and it was like finally seeing someone after being blind for years. I still have chills running up and down my spine. Also: Sondheim forum, online journal, and various gems (and bombs) on youtube -- including the man himself teaching a master class and this 12-year-old's spirited performance!
posted by grumblebee at 1:33 PM PST - 14 comments

(Spoilers in most links). So an SNL digital short, Dear Sister spoofs the second season finale of the OC. Now the internets just don't know when to stop, with parodies (of the parody) playing on everything from the obvious like The Departed, LOST, Snatch, The Matrix, Reservoir Dogs, and Predator to the not-so-obvious like Lord of the Rings, Raging Bull, Monty Python, Duck Hunt (my favorite), Looney Toons, LazyTown, Smash Brothers, Office Space, and Bio-Ooze Super Soakers.
posted by ztdavis at 12:26 PM PST - 65 comments

Pakistani play parodying burkas is banned A play called Burkavaganza, a satire on the burka, staged this month by the Ajoka Theatre Group in the city of Lahore has been banned by Musharraf's regime. The director of the Ajoka is vowing to challenge the ban on constitutional grounds.
posted by Azaadistani at 12:25 PM PST - 11 comments

On Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling's blog, Curt responds to commenter questions, reviews his starts pitch-by-pitch, discusses his various charities, engages ex-teammate Kevin Millar in conversation, and responds to the recent controversy over his bloody sock from the 2004 postseason. Love him or hate him (or defend his blogging, at least), it's a new way for athletes to engage the public, and any baseball fan can learn a lot from his analysis of his starts.
posted by ibmcginty at 12:09 PM PST - 23 comments

Paleo-Future: A look into the future that never was. More recent predictions include the future according to AT&T, Apple's Knowledge Navigator and Bill Gates on the Future of Police Work.
posted by phaedon at 11:24 AM PST - 22 comments

Outragefilter: After a photo labeled "drunken pirate" was found on her MySpace page, 27-year-old student teacher and college senior Stacy Snyder was denied teaching credentials by Millersville University officials. This week, she filed a federal lawsuit against the school.
posted by MegoSteve at 11:14 AM PST - 67 comments

"I felt Islam was so black and white and there were no grey areas. These Muslim kids, who are punks, they are in these grey areas." ~ Michael Muhammed Knight.

Behold Taqwacore: a new movement of Islam-influenced punk rock which has its origins in the pages of a controversial novel.
posted by moonbird at 9:26 AM PST - 28 comments

Every year, the quiet northern German farming village of Wacken becomes the site of the largest metal festival in Europe. South Korean documentary maker, Sung Myung Cho, recently went along to see how the locals deal with this annual weekend of metal mayhem. Here's the trailer of the film that resulted.
posted by jodrell banksmeadow at 9:22 AM PST - 14 comments

Hit Record -- the website of child actor-turned-respectable young thespian Joseph Gordon-Levitt. [more inside]
posted by pxe2000 at 6:34 AM PST - 33 comments

Chinese Public Art The Workers' Paradise has always produced propaganda artwork. Lately, though, the subjects are sometimes at odds with tradition.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:38 AM PST - 13 comments

Word Dissassociation A lovely little song made up of completely random words.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:23 AM PST - 22 comments

Is anyone really surprised to hear that our happy little friends at SCO just got a a delisting notice from Nasdaq? If you own SCO stock, this might be a good time to look at a timeshare instead. (winky winky) (via)
posted by metasonix at 2:05 AM PST - 48 comments

Brains!
posted by homunculus at 11:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Randall Tobias, the former drug company executive chosen as Global AIDS Ambassador by the Bush administration, has resigned "for personal reasons" after having "no sex" to demonstrate Bush's abstinence-only AIDS prevention plan with alleged call girls from Pamela Martin and Associates.

Previously, Deborah Jeanne Palfrey outed Harlan "Shock and Awe" Ullman. Keep your eyes glued to the TV, America, she might name 10,000 others even though the feds don't want her to!
posted by jdfalk at 8:53 PM PST - 62 comments

The Fúfumal. One link. No YouTube. Behold the tale of Fúfu, a small rabbit.
posted by eriko at 8:05 PM PST - 26 comments

AtheistFilter: Excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Excerpt two: "Was Muhammad Epileptic?" Three: "Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion" (via)
posted by bardic at 5:52 PM PST - 73 comments

Amazing art by Kris Kuksi. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 5:25 PM PST - 25 comments

How to be a pirate. The first part of a book project that didn't sell.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:10 PM PST - 26 comments

It's Friday night, and us workaday schlubs deserve to fantasize about “an unconventional and extraordinary getaway,” don't we? Do you fancy an overnight stay in a 1968 decommissioned Coast Guard Sikorsky, pithily dubbed the Hotelicopter? Or maybe in the Treehouse, 35 feet off the ground and with a full bar? Winvian is a 113-acre resort in Connecticut's Litchfield Hills; dotting the grounds are eighteen cottages in whimsical themes. Like, an artist's studio, complete with blank canvas, watercolors and oils, just in case inspiration strikes. And a tomb-like structure named "The Secret Society" -- an homage to Yale's Skull and Bones temple (most of the 14 architects that designed the hotel's cottages are Yale alums). Win Smith Jr., the former Merrill Lynch exec and owner of Vermont ski spot Sugarbush, built the resort on his family's property to save it from becoming a high-rise development. No shortage of luxury-travel reviewers are salivating over Smith's "experiential retreat," just opened this spring. A daily rate starting at $1450 includes the continental breakfast nook, full breakfast, lunch, picnics, spa snacks, afternoon tea, cocktails, dinner, and after dinner petit-fours. The main building is a restored 1775 colonial with a cigar-and-brandy lounge, art gallery, and 130-variety wine cellar... and also boasts an appropriately gothic backstory. Who needs to pay the rent, anyway?
posted by pineapple at 4:18 PM PST - 10 comments

How can those skinny Japanse eaters like "Gal" Sone and Nobuyuki Shirota down so much food? CT scans show stomachs which expand to freakishly huge proportions.
posted by jaimev at 3:36 PM PST - 18 comments

There's been plenty of Bullshit! on MetaFilter before, and now there's more: Boy Scouts [1, 2, 3] ("Duty to God ahead of country, others, and self, is the credo of suicide bombers."); Wal-Mart Hatred ("Wal-Mart is one of the great anti-poverty programmes in the country."); Circumcision ("By the end of this programme, one of these three will drop their pants and show us the restored foreskin on their penis."); and The Best ("Stupid? How many of you are searching for it on the web right now?").
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 3:22 PM PST - 44 comments

The US Navy Safety office features a new Safety Yikes! Photo every week. Featuring cases such as: 12 foot Sunroof T; Are 20 splices in a 8 splice box too many?; Trust; I don't need a truck; Ladder trouble, 2, 3, 4, 5; Jack Stands; What's the amp rating on a 5/8^ths lug bolt; and the always popular Humans make good tiedowns. Special mention to this nice try.
posted by Mitheral at 2:07 PM PST - 16 comments

"Alright Joes, come with me for a strip search." [NSFW unless you work for the Bureau of Prisons] The correct way to conduct a strip search. [via]
posted by kirkaracha at 1:56 PM PST - 28 comments

Exposed: I'm not a plastic bag! Queues this week have gone around the block for a designer cotton bag designed by Anya Hindmarch available at Sainsbury's, the British grocer. The bag, which was designed to raise awareness of fair trade and ethical issues, was actually mass produced by sweatshop labor in China and is neither fair trade nor organic. Bags are selling for as much at $200 on Ebay. Anya Hindmarch herself has not apologized for the bag, saying: "We will be launching I’m Not A Plastic Bag in the US in June (in a limited edition navy blue) and in Japan in July (in a limited edition bottle green)."
posted by parmanparman at 1:21 PM PST - 36 comments

"Is Wi-Fi going to turn out to be the tobacco, asbestos or Thalidomide of the 21st century? It's looking that way." Woman choses to live in a Faraday cage to ameliorate the symptoms caused by electrosmog. It's funny that she looks so much like a beekeeper in her fancy hat, given the recent kerfuffle (from another UK paper) about mobile phones wiping out the bees. Coming soon: faraday undies. [via]
posted by scblackman at 12:29 PM PST - 83 comments

The Canadian government has released its new Turning the Corner plan for regulating greenhouse gases, setting mandatory intensity-based emission targets (18% reduction over three years) for major industrial sectors. Firms exceeding their targets will be required to pay $15/tonne starting in 2010. Expected cost: $7-8B per year, offset by an expected $6B benefit from improved health. Kyoto targets won't be reached until 2020, eight years late. Reaction from industry, Alberta, the Opposition. Previous proposal from Opposition leader Stephane Dion. Previously.
posted by russilwvong at 12:04 PM PST - 12 comments

Makibishi Comic! (possibly NSFW) A surreal-manga-find-the-ninja flash game. via writeup & interview with creator at Joystiq
posted by juv3nal at 11:44 AM PST - 10 comments

"Of 10 governments worldwide implicated in the recruitment or use of children as soldiers, nine receive US military assistance."
posted by chunking express at 11:22 AM PST - 23 comments

It's Uncle Muscle's Hour!!
posted by Tommy Gnosis at 11:19 AM PST - 32 comments

Exploding Storm Drain - It may be a single video link, but the scale blew me away.
posted by lemonfridge at 10:54 AM PST - 82 comments

Don't Tell Ryan!
posted by Addiction at 10:39 AM PST - 35 comments

Happy Birthday, Paul "Ace" Frehley.
posted by psmealey at 10:34 AM PST - 30 comments

This lip sych of Flagpole Sitta is all kinds of awesome. An old favorite made new again by the office staff of Collegehumor et al in one take. It's a little slow to start, but it hits pure joy by the end.
posted by mathowie at 9:57 AM PST - 102 comments

The artist who explored the beginning of life last year presents his meditation on the end of life, designed to teach kids about the hazards of underage drinking.
posted by rottytooth at 9:22 AM PST - 20 comments

What if Apple is bad for design? Or at least not good?
posted by Extopalopaketle at 8:51 AM PST - 80 comments

As an interesting follow-up to the excellent post about Fuck law from last year, a controversy is brewing about the article's scholarly merit. Brian Leiter issued his Most Downloaded Law Faculty Rankings and excluded Ohio State and Emory because their "presence in the top 15 was due entirely to one provocatively titled article by Christopher Fairman who teaches at Ohio State and is visiting at Emory; without Fairman’s paper, neither Ohio State nor Emory would be close to the top 15." There has been some dispute over Leiter's omission of the two faculties on that basis. Fairman weighed in on the issue with his new article Fuck and Faculty Rankings.
posted by dios at 8:17 AM PST - 37 comments

The Structure of Search Engine Law, by James Grimmelmann. [abstract inside]
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:51 AM PST - 10 comments

Riverbend and her family decided to leave Iraq.
posted by growabrain at 7:45 AM PST - 68 comments

Feed2JS is an amazingly cool (free) service that lets you harness the wealth of RSS feeds out there for yourself (embedding them in your blog template or web page) in a very simple and highly configurable way. Style it with one of the available CSS styles, or write your own. If you like you can also download the whole Feed2JS application/script to run on your own server. (Step-by-step tutorial inside)
posted by spock at 7:16 AM PST - 27 comments

A newly released Mississippi State University study claims that kids with religious parents are better behaved than other children. Is it the spanking?
posted by Otis at 5:42 AM PST - 150 comments

Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007). Master cellist and renowned conductor, Rostropovich was one of the great artistic dissidents of the Soviet Union. He started his career as a star of the Moscow Conservatory and lived long enough to play his cello in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. More from the Associated Press and Wikipedia.
posted by ardgedee at 4:21 AM PST - 36 comments

Man in his thirties comes back from the dead on Easter Sunday. Oh oh. I'm off to confession, pronto.
posted by fcummins at 3:31 AM PST - 17 comments

'In defense of film critics' posits that 'Film critics [unlike food critics, etc] are expected to be cheerleaders.' I guess we're not supposed to think it's odd that the piece was written by paper's resident film critic. He does ask at least one good question, though: why have so many truly awful [and poorly reviewed ] films done so well at the the box office this year?
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:13 AM PST - 36 comments

Floyd Collins was a caver who became trapped in Sand Cave on January 30th, 1925 50m from the entrance by a 26 1/2 pound rock. He was found and provided with food and media attention until February 4 when a further collapse cut him off, leading to frantic tunneling attempts, but he was found dead on the 17th of February.
His body was recovered some time later, and displayed in a pay per view coffin. After his leg was stolen his coffin was removed from public display and in 1989 he received another burial under a tombstone reading "Greatest Cave Explorer Ever Known"
posted by scodger at 2:55 AM PST - 28 comments

A miniature version of the metroid-style Castlevania games. It starts off in a teeny tiny window. Try it fullscreen here.
posted by boo_radley at 1:26 AM PST - 19 comments

Paternity Discrepancy. "My little boy was there, he was up at bat, and I started yelling for him, 'Go Matthew [not his real name]! Knock it out of the park!' And another man started screaming for Matthew. Louder than me. I looked over, and I looked at him, and I was like, Who is this guy? And I looked at my son, and I looked at him … and they were identical."
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:06 AM PST - 185 comments

The stupa (aka the chorten or the pagoda) is Buddhism's universal piece of symbolic architecture. Borobodur in Java is probably the most famous, while Burma's Shwedagon Pagoda is the largest, and the Kyaik-htiyo Pagoda on the Golden Rock may be the most precarious. They're common across the Himalayas, and sometimes hidden in caves.
posted by homunculus at 11:15 PM PST - 19 comments

Restoring a sense of pleasure The Raelian movement has been discussed here before . Clitoraid is their latest scam and you can donate now to adopt a clitoris and help them build the Pleasure Hospital in Ouagadougou.
posted by theemperorhasnoclotheson at 9:54 PM PST - 21 comments

"Some legal experts said the charge against Allen Lee is troubling because it was over an essay that even police admit contained no direct threats against anyone at the school." Newsfilter: A high school senior is arrested for a "disturbing" essay in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting.
posted by Many bubbles at 9:01 PM PST - 78 comments

The Computer Monster (YouTube, approx. 4 minutes). Also known as "The Coffee Break Machine," the original version was created for IBM, in 1967, by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, as part of the Muppet Meeting Films series. The posted version is a remake that was performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. Via The Presurfer.
posted by amyms at 8:58 PM PST - 13 comments

Bruce Shapiro builds wonderful art using industrial motors and actuators. Examples: a sand plotter, A bubble display, and a dancing ribbon (2M WMV). [via Make]
posted by pombe at 8:39 PM PST - 7 comments

In this century, you may have dozens of programming languages lurking on your machine. But how to use them?? A fundamental secret! Well, no more. We cannot stand for that. Hackety Hack will not stand to have you in the dark! Now with 100% more MeFi.
posted by signal at 8:03 PM PST - 27 comments

Tha interweb have the 70's funk you need: Stevie Wonder. Sly & the Family Stone. James Brown. Ohio Players. Bootsy Collins. Edwin Starr. And the documentary Make It Funky, parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:29 PM PST - 47 comments

This is interesting. Presented by the NOAA Space Environment Center (SEC) The official NOAA, NASA, and ISES Solar Cycle 24 prediction was released by the Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel on April 25, 2007. The Prediction Panel included members from NOAA, NASA, ISES and other US and International representatives. Press Briefings and presentations at the SEC Space Weather Workshop, plus additional announcements and information from the Panel are linked below. The Panel expects to update this prediction annually.
posted by RoseyD at 7:13 PM PST - 9 comments

ObitFilter: Bobby "Boris" Pickett, 69 To remember him by: "Monster Mash" video mashup, his official site (with spooky 1998 sound), "The Climate Mash" (2005 eco-political rewrite with Pickett's vocal), and his lesser-known co-creation (with Peter Ferarra): "Star Drek"
posted by wendell at 6:35 PM PST - 24 comments

Classic Short Stories — "Fewer and fewer people these days read short stories. This is unfortunate—so few will ever experience the joy that reading such fine work can give. The goal of this site is to give a nice cross section of short stories in the hope that these short stories will excite these people into rediscovering this excellent source of entertainment." Authors represented include Saki, Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Marquez, H. G. Wells, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens, William Carlos Williams and Katherine Mansfield.
posted by Kattullus at 5:10 PM PST - 26 comments

Jack Valenti, RIP.
posted by Astro Zombie at 5:07 PM PST - 89 comments

Who's feeling sick? Probably a whole lot of people around you by the looks of this service, which tracks illness around the country as people report their symptoms. Mostly US and European-centric at this stage, but as more people around the world report their symptoms that can begin to change.
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:35 PM PST - 16 comments

Is your plan of spending an idyllic Saturday at the lake playing fetch with your chocolate Lab hampered by the fact that you don't own a chocolate Lab? Flexpetz to the rescue! If you live in Los Angeles or San Diego, you can rent a dog by the day.
posted by freshwater_pr0n at 3:54 PM PST - 37 comments

All your donuts are belong to us. The US government has mandated that by 2012, all new vehicles must have Electronic Stability Control. ESC senses when a driver may lose control of the vehicle and automatically applies brakes to individual wheels to help stabilize it and avoid a rollover.
posted by jaimev at 3:27 PM PST - 39 comments

Frozen Indigo Angel Video producer Paul Denchfield recently noticed the words 'Frozen Indigo Angel' appearing on some work he'd produced for the BBC's Radio One website. Wanting to know what it was about, he contacted the corporation but they were evasive about it and not long afterwards he was told his services were no longer required. Not wanting to take it lying down, he's started blogging about the phenomena, which is virally spreading across the BBC's digital content, even popping up in the information window of DAB radios, trying to get to the bottom of this thing which has apparently cost him his job. Simple marketing or something more sinister?
posted by feelinglistless at 3:26 PM PST - 40 comments

Two police officers pleaded guilty Thursday to manslaughter in the shooting death of a 92-year-old woman during a botched drug raid last fall. A third officer still faces charges. (Previous MeFi)
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 3:18 PM PST - 85 comments

The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, online gallery. Revealing nature's oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail; color photographs of deep ocean species, some photographed for the first time. An online companion to the book by Claire Nouvian. Deep-sea photography.
posted by nickyskye at 3:03 PM PST - 36 comments

Getting around underground in NYC is no longer only for people who already know how to get around underground in NYC. Graphic Designer Eric Jabbour has been spending his free time obsessively redesigning MTA transit maps. And the results are striking. Non-New Yorkers will undoubtedly be able to figure out what's what. Cleaner lines and neighborhood boundaries are just a few features. Also, one can clearly see and understand transfer points and more street names.
posted by sneakin at 2:07 PM PST - 89 comments

Ross The Intern is now video blogging. Some of his segments from Jay Leno's The Tonight Show -- Burbank Fire Department | Christina Aguilera | Crocodile Hunter | Golden Globes | Jesse James | Pit Crew | Weatherman | The Winter Olympics.
posted by ericb at 1:18 PM PST - 15 comments

Two peregrine falcon chicks hatched today (almost) live on downtown Indianapolis' FalconCam. Yay! They're very cute, but the parent sits on them a lot.
posted by thirteenkiller at 12:20 PM PST - 12 comments

How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran by Joshuah Bearman. As history keeps on happening, all people and events are becoming linked to each other in strange and inexplicable ways. Once in a while those links surface into view. Here, then, is the key event that connects Jack Kirby and Roger Zelazny to the CIA's handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. Via Wired Magazine and good evening.
posted by JHarris at 12:17 PM PST - 36 comments

Senate backs Iraq withdrawal date The US Senate has voted to approve a bill which requires US troops to be withdrawn from Iraq within 11 months.
posted by chunking express at 11:15 AM PST - 131 comments

Prototaxites, what is it? Is it wood? Is it algae? Why, it's a humungous fungus. Scientists were long baffled by the mystery organism, which was recently verified to be a 350 million year old fungus that stood more than twenty feet tall. It doesn't look like much in the hands of Geologist Kevin Boyce, but the far sexier artist's rendering gives you a better idea of what an odd geological bird Prototaxites was.
posted by The Straightener at 11:05 AM PST - 21 comments

impeachy keen! learn why cleveland is the capital of polka, bowling and kielbasa.
posted by quonsar at 10:28 AM PST - 35 comments

Full of throttle (Via)
posted by Abiezer at 9:55 AM PST - 14 comments

A Japanese actress complains that her new poodle doesn't bark and won't eat dog food. Why's that? Because it's a lamb. Apparently as many as 2,000 people in Japan may have been duped. Let the punning commence.
posted by cerebus19 at 9:55 AM PST - 106 comments

"The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn't have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on." Bill Moyers returned to PBS last night with this documentary (transcript) examining the mainstream media's role in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
posted by ibmcginty at 9:50 AM PST - 55 comments

Facebook informericial parody This is a pretty hilarious video of Facebook users. Very well done.
posted by willthethrill at 9:18 AM PST - 27 comments

I stumbled across this incredible photograph and discovered Dar Robinson. One of his first professional stunts was jumping 100 feet into the ocean for Papillon. He jumped from one plane and into another in free fall over the Mojave desert. He jumped 1200 feet attached to only an 1/8-inch cable from Toronto's CN Tower. He set the world record (one of the 20+ he ultimately held) for free fall from a helicopter (music warning) in 1979. His unique falling stunts (1:56 & 2:36 in, Charles Durning in a wig & Hawaiian shirt warning) used a decelerator instead of air bags which allowed for camera angles that showed the ground, unique for pre-cgi days. He never broke a bone in his body during his 19-year career, making his untimely death from a non-stunt motorcyle accident on location all the more ironic, although lack of adequate medical services contributed (scroll down to filming hazards). Commemorated with a tv documentary and given an honorary Oscar in 1995, there is surprisingly little on the internet about him or his work.
posted by ambulance blues at 9:13 AM PST - 16 comments

“With the number of human beings having increased more than six-fold in the past 200 years, the modern mind simply assumes that men and women . . . will always breed enough children to grow the population . . . Yet, for more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population decline. . . . Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.”
posted by jason's_planet at 9:10 AM PST - 79 comments

Looking for a mermaid or chimera for your trophy room? Artist Sarina Brewer uses roadkill and discarded livestock to create unusual fashions, art and more. Links maybe nightmare fuel for sensitive readers.
posted by drezdn at 9:01 AM PST - 14 comments

"I am a transsexual sportswriter," reads Mike (soon to be Christine) Penner's touching, brave column in today's L.A. Times. Although Mike's transgender identity is rare, it's natural ... and it seems that he is not alone. Christina Karl started her sportswriting career as Chris, and according to her, "nobody has batted an eye." Nip/Tuck's creators are even developing a series about a transsexual sportswriter's career and family life. One thing's for sure: the USTA's non-discrimination policy just got a lot more blurry ...
posted by chinese_fashion at 8:55 AM PST - 74 comments

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates, according to former department lawyers and a review of written records.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:58 AM PST - 153 comments

In honor of tomorrow's Freedom Day (April 27), please enjoy these tales from elections past...
posted by loosemouth at 5:47 AM PST - 15 comments

A communication primer. A pretty basic, but well-written primer on effective communication, and proper understanding of the communication process, barriers, listening, feedback and non-verbal hints. Don Clark's site contains a lot of well-formed ideas on leadership and human performance without resorting to mumbo-jumbo and buzzwords. Not your typical MBA / self-help bs.
posted by psmealey at 5:31 AM PST - 9 comments

The University of Columbias Earth Institute has successfully demonstrated carbon dioxide air capturing. As to what could be done with the carbon dioxide after, the IPCC has some ideas (pdf). Unfortunately they don't state how much energy these machines consume or how expensive (toxic, etc.) their prodction is going to be.
posted by Glow Bucket at 2:25 AM PST - 38 comments

MBAs Without Borders - the Médecins Sans Frontières of the business world. [via the slightly alarming Springwise]
posted by patricio at 2:13 AM PST - 17 comments

I like a good laugh, but this gave me stomach cramps. If you tend to pee when you laugh you might want to take care of that first. And in case that's not enough baby, just wait, there's more! hoooo. hah. warning: YouTube loving double whammy
posted by From Bklyn at 2:03 AM PST - 71 comments

OOOMS is a Dutch design company with interesting products. Anti-Gravity Machine, Lo-Res Chair, Rebellious Desk and Golden Staples are among my favorites. Slightly NSFW for the very small thumbnailed image of some stylish sex toys. Via
posted by lazaruslong at 11:29 PM PST - 26 comments

The new 'Discover Islamic Art in the Mediterranean' site incorporates material from 14 countries through 18 exhibition sites that explore the the cultural and artistic heritage of Islamic dynasties spanning 1200 years. [via].
posted by peacay at 11:27 PM PST - 14 comments

Burmese Daze: In which the author submits to the pleasures of a transgender spirit possession festival in Burma. [Via Disinformation.]
posted by homunculus at 10:49 PM PST - 11 comments

Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. was born into vaudeville. He quickly became a popular and controversial part of his family's stage act; an act that had his father violently hurling the "disobedient" child across the stage into scenery, the orchestra pit, or even into the audience, only to see him emerge amazingly unharmed. After the boy took an unplanned and particularly clamorous fall down a hotel stairwell, an astonished Harry Houdini cried out to the parents, "What a buster your kid took!" And thus, as legend has it, did little Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. become Buster Keaton.

At 22, Keaton made his cinematic debut with mentor Fatty Arbuckle. Afterward, he immediately founded Buster Keaton Studios, releasing a series of brilliant short (and later longer) comedies. Dozens of these are freely available to stream or download at the Internet Archive, including Steamboat Bill Jr, Convict 13, The Electric House, and his seminal The General (alt), which, despite completely failing at the box office, would be later hailed by many as one of the greatest films of all time. [more inside]
posted by churl at 7:54 PM PST - 58 comments

Back in the mid-nineties, before broadband took hold, the CD ROM was drawing considerable interest from publishers, musicians and other artists. Notable (for contrasting reasons): Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel, The Residents' Freak Show, Peter Gabriel's Xplora, The Voyager Company. Launch, Media Band, Headcandy.
posted by davebush at 6:19 PM PST - 22 comments

"Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on what you've searched for on Google and which sites you've visited." Google unveils Web History, a new feature to help you "view and manage your web activity." You can also get an idea of what sites you visit frequently, broken down by time of day, and search across the full text of pages you've visited. "If you remember seeing something online, you'll be able to find it faster and from any computer with Web History. " What could possibly go wrong?
posted by jbickers at 6:03 PM PST - 26 comments

"If you can save one life - change two people's minds then you will have done something in life." Noel Martin plans to commit suicide 11 years after a neo-nazi attack left him paralyzed.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:57 PM PST - 58 comments

Nora the cat plays piano Plus there's a sequel!
posted by parm=serial at 5:43 PM PST - 27 comments

Invasion of the TeRKs!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:02 PM PST - 3 comments

The demo scene is alive and well. Showing off just what can be done with your computer with tiny programs (serious hardware required, video link included). The point of this post? Sumotori Dreams. A physics based game packed into 96k. It's not the gameplay itself which is so great, it's the stumbling drunk AI characters. Play a round, then sit back and watch them stumble (youtube). Safe for work, if gales of laughter don't draw suspicion.
posted by tomble at 4:36 PM PST - 49 comments

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are all online for you to peruse. The library consists of around 180 full text PDFs by a wide variety of authors -- Christine Korsgaard, Antonin Scalia, Jared Diamond, John Rawls, Richard Dawkins, Frans de Waal E.O. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and the previously mentioned Elaine Scarry among them. Lots of interesting reading to be... read. Navigation is to the left. The collection is sorted alphabetically by author.
posted by cog_nate at 2:57 PM PST - 12 comments

"Let your house be a meetinghouse for the sages and sit amid the dust of their feet and drink in the whiskey that comes out of their flip -flops with thirst."
posted by kosem at 2:56 PM PST - 31 comments

Al Qaeda Strikes Back. By Bruce Riedel. From Foreign Affairs. Al Qaeda has more bases, more partners, and more followers today than it did on the eve of 9/11. Now the group is working to set up networks in the Middle East and Africa -- and may even try to lure the United States into a war with Iran.
posted by semmi at 2:41 PM PST - 32 comments

What's the deal with Jews and Chinese food? Just one gem from Jesse Brown, a legendary and entertaining contributor to CBC radio, print, and other media. Here's another one. Okay, one more. Did I mention he's the 121st Greatest Canadian of all Time?
posted by Turtles all the way down at 2:31 PM PST - 48 comments

shortwavemusic An audio blog of music and noise (and musical noise) found on the shortwave band.
posted by carter at 12:47 PM PST - 22 comments

The hagfish (YouTube) is also known as the slime eel. It can also tie itself in a knot. Designer eel skin.
posted by nickyskye at 10:52 AM PST - 31 comments

End of an Empire Sadly (for me, anyway) the Empire Rollerdrome, last roller rink in New York City, closed its doors for good this weekend after nearly 70 years in business. Although it had a checkered history of sex, drugs, and hip hop, the Empire was in recent years a much-loved family and community center in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. DJ Julio (who kept the crowd rolling at the Roxy for decades until they too closed earlier this year) maintains a fabulous archive of material about all of NYC's bygone rinks. If you want to see what you've been missing, check out the Central Park Dance Skaters.
posted by sonofslim at 10:23 AM PST - 18 comments

Your beer pong game sucks.
posted by sluglicker at 10:04 AM PST - 44 comments

The phone is ringing, and I don't recognize the number, All Caller ID says is, "NAME UNAVAILABLE". Please help me figure out who is calling and what they want (about whocalled.us) Reviews: Wired's Kevin Poulsen, Lifehacker, O'Reilly Radar's Tim O'Reilly, ZDNet's Phil Windley, BoingBoing's David Pescovitz, and Yahoo's Christopher Null
posted by acro at 9:40 AM PST - 35 comments

Torture innocents or suffer the consequences. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) expounded yesterday on the process of 'extraordinary rendition' where suspects are flown to foreign countries outside of US law, so they can be tortured for information. He's got no problem with it, even if innocents are involved. [more inside]
posted by bitmage at 9:32 AM PST - 89 comments

Hobo Expert, MeFite, Daily Show Resident Expert, and reluctant celebrity John Hodgman's recent appearance on This American Life is truly inspired stuff. "He tells the story of what happens when celebrity hunts you down and finds you...on your living room couch, pushing 40, and a couple sizes larger than you want to be." Apparently Bill Gates isn't a fan. His loss.
posted by chuckdarwin at 8:59 AM PST - 60 comments

There's Good In Evel. 70's icon (and my own personal role model at the time) "Evel" Knievel spoke on Palm Sunday at the Crystal Cathedral about his miraculous conversion to Christianity during Daytona Bike Week. Immediately, between 500 and 800 people committed or rededicated their lives to God. Found via J-Walk.
posted by ba at 8:51 AM PST - 51 comments

25 y.o. whistle-blower. Last Fall, a 24 y.o. by the name of Justen Deal, blew the whistle on what he perceived to be profligate waste by his employers. As an IT guy at Kaiser-Permanente, he'd seen a $442 million database project scrapped by the new CEO and replaced by a sweetheart deal for one of the CEO's former contractors. Internal estimates placed Kaiser's losses on this new contract at $1.2 billion dollars per quarter [more inside]
posted by vhsiv at 8:46 AM PST - 74 comments

NY Mag instructs six New Yorkers to chronicle their sex lives for a week. Results? Men under report masturbation. Married people don't have sex. Thirty-something female theater directors are where it's at ... and this gem, "If I had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t have blacked out and lost my wallet!"
posted by geoff. at 8:22 AM PST - 40 comments

China's African oil safari turns bloody again. "Before dawn this morning At 0430 AM local time in Ogaden, the 'Dufaan' commando unit of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) conducted a military operation in the vicinity of Obala, 30km North-West of Degah-Bur in in Northern Ogaden." Sixty-five Ethiopians and nine Chinese were killed in an attack of an unprecedented scale. Another seven Chinese workers are being held by the ONLF. (BBCFocusAfrica interviews ONLF spokesman (.ram streaming audio))
posted by Abiezer at 7:56 AM PST - 12 comments

A nine-year-old girl had a baby; her rapist gets twenty-five years. She is not the youngest mother: Lina Medina bore a child at age five. Other young mothers.
posted by Robert Angelo at 7:50 AM PST - 68 comments

"The average person will eat over 10,000 bars of chocolate, shed 121 pints of tears and have sex more than 4,200 times". A documentary airing tonight in the UK is attempting a new method of visualizing statistics related to an individual's impact on the environment. Human Footprint is scheduled to air on Channel 4 at 9PM GMT. There is a "calculator" you can use to get the statistics adjusted for your age (and give you a little more data behind the statistics if you can sit through a page by page flash demo).
posted by notmtwain at 7:44 AM PST - 28 comments

The last thing the Middle East's main players want is US troops to leave Iraq.
posted by reklaw at 7:42 AM PST - 11 comments

A group of enthusiasts bring you live vessel movements from around the Irish Sea (and further!) derived from AIS data. Click on the map to see the individual ships, their statistics and photos. Nice use of google maps here see who is docked and who is underway
posted by mattoxic at 5:04 AM PST - 15 comments

Win £500 from the Royal Society of Chemistry (or a place on a Chinese science undergraduate course) if your math skills are up to it.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 4:53 AM PST - 25 comments

So there are crosses, stars of David, Buddhist wheels, etc, but what do atheists get? Well, "Nothing" might be the proper symbol, but look here, there's a bunch of possibilities. Atheist, Humanist, Darwinist. BTW, the American Atheist (MM O'Hare) symbol is the one the US Army will put on the headstone of any atheist corpses they might find in foxholes.
posted by CCBC at 2:45 AM PST - 113 comments

104 year-old Herb Hamerol was the lone survivor on hand at this year's 101st memorial for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. To some people he's a celebrity. Truth is, to attend the memorial he took the day off from his long-held job as a stock clerk at Andronico's supermarket. Yes, read that paragraph again.
posted by miss lynnster at 12:00 AM PST - 33 comments

Bush's Mistake and Kennedy's Error. What happens when someone says, "I was wrong"?
posted by Eekacat at 11:49 PM PST - 12 comments

Entheogens and Psychotherapy. A 2001 paper by Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics and his own experience with LSD. Now, because of this paper, he is no longer allowed to enter the U.S. [Via MindHacks.]
posted by homunculus at 10:42 PM PST - 20 comments

40,000 bees. 7 Days. One Vase.
posted by jonson at 10:26 PM PST - 18 comments

Milestones in graphics, maps, and visualizations. An incredible site for anyone interested in the history of visualization of data. See the first town map from 6200 BCE. Take a look at some of the most important graphics through history, including the London cholera map and the diagrams that made Florence Nightingale's case, as well as recent examples of some of the worst. Also check out the fascinating history of timelines, or Cabinet magazine's beautifully illustrated Timeline of Timelines.
posted by blahblahblah at 10:20 PM PST - 13 comments

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Portrayed as an interpretive dance. It's got a slow start, but it's still strangely adorable. We are entering a new age of Joyce scholarship.
posted by ScotchLynx at 9:51 PM PST - 8 comments

"UNTIL you experiment with chlorine, you have missed some of the biggest thrills your home laboratory can give you." Sound like fun? Bet you'll want to set up your own home chemistry lab and try it out. But don't stop there - the wonders of hydrogen and mercury await! Make a gas that gives you the giggles, then blow stuff up for more guffaws. And that's just part of only one section of Modern Mechanix - "Yesterday's Tomorrow, Today!"
posted by hangashore at 7:50 PM PST - 13 comments

An impressive array of anti-RIAA articles, mostly from people within the music industry.
posted by Dr. Wu at 7:21 PM PST - 13 comments

Tom Smith is your average guy who likes comic books, Harlan Ellison short stories and Julie Newmar in a Catwoman suit (who dosen't?). Except the thing is, the guy can sing and write music too. And he releases a free song every week at his iTom page. Like most artists his music can be hit and miss, but there's some great free music to be found there such as Contessa and the awesome Jim Henson tribute A Boy and His Frog. Oh, and he also runs the 'Digital Acoustic' livejournal, where he discusses all manner of things such as comics, politics and of course, music. Sure, he's no cortex, but he's pretty damn good and well worth a listen.
posted by Effigy2000 at 6:13 PM PST - 6 comments

Faulkner or machine translation? Who wrote it? William Faulkner or some German-translating computer robot program? You decide!
posted by John of Michigan at 5:34 PM PST - 35 comments

I used to wonder where all the protest songs had gone. Now I’ve found where over 17,000 (and counting) of them have gone. Audio conditionally NSFW. via
posted by Huplescat at 5:20 PM PST - 24 comments

Geologists have discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests , near Danville IL. The four square miles of fossils are in a coal mine 250 feet below the surface.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 5:13 PM PST - 11 comments

Obviously, you're not a golfer. So let the WiigoBot do all the hard work.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:18 PM PST - 23 comments

Spacefilter: ESA telescope detects planet 20 lightyears away with a temperature between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, dubbed "most Earth-like planet yet."
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 2:53 PM PST - 104 comments

The British Ministry of Defence has been thinking about the future , and 2037 looks like it'll be a doozy. Others have been thinking about it too, and they believe they'll be mainly hot, sweaty, dirty and confusing. Of course, if you're the Canadian military, you get a science fiction author to write your future for you.
posted by Happy Dave at 2:10 PM PST - 17 comments

"I ain’t a pretty boy no more" Roger Ebert is determined to attend his Overlooked Film Festival tomorrow.

We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I'm not going to miss my festival.

[via]
posted by kirkaracha at 11:30 AM PST - 123 comments

Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps: a good read from The Guardian.
posted by byronimation at 11:18 AM PST - 133 comments

Gizmo - using news footage from the 1920s to the 1950s, Howard Smith created an amusing 1977 documentary about contraptions made by the inventors, technophiles, and eccentrics of yesteryear. The last 7 minutes is Letterman interviewing Smith. (Google video, 1 hr., 19 min. Via beans beans good for your heart)
posted by madamjujujive at 10:46 AM PST - 10 comments

Elizabeth Drew analyzes the current confrontation between the White House and Congress over continued funding for the Iraq war. Under Nancy Pelosi's leadership, Congress has reached an agreement to pass a bill which approves $124 billion in funding for the war, but sets a timetable for withdrawal. Following the passage of the Senate bill in March, Bush gave a more-than-normally petulant speech against the Democratic proposals—prompting Pelosi, like a mother scolding a teenager, to urge Bush to "calm down with the threats" and to "take a deep breath." This was the first public suggestion by a prominent elected figure that the President lacks maturity—a widely held view in Washington.
posted by russilwvong at 10:37 AM PST - 54 comments

Connie Meskimen of Hot Springs, Arkansas has a down-to-earth explanation for climate change! What the scientists and the Fifth Column environmentalists bent on wrecking American industry hope that you'll overlook!
posted by Mayor Curley at 10:14 AM PST - 102 comments

Mummenschanz on the Muppets Footage of swiss mime troop, Mummenschanz... [2, 3, 4]
posted by drezdn at 9:31 AM PST - 37 comments

Illusion art by Octavio Ocampo, a painter from Mexico. Sometimes illusion art is made using unlikely materials, like Jason Mecier's art made out of beans, noodles etc. [previously] or like Scott Blake's barcode images. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 9:09 AM PST - 14 comments

A free audio podcast of The Globe Theatre’s 2007 version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing has been posted online by the UK's Department for Education for use by teachers and pupils without easy access to a professional production but can be downloaded by everyone. Streaming and mp3 versions available. [via]
posted by feelinglistless at 8:56 AM PST - 6 comments

Kryptonite! A new mineral has been found in Serbia which 'closely matches' the chemical compound of Superman's least favourite substance (sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide). Too bad it isn't green.
posted by chuckdarwin at 8:37 AM PST - 23 comments

Chase scene. Chase scene. Chase scene. Chase scene. Chase scene. Chase scene. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:28 AM PST - 96 comments

Fred Fish Passed away April 20, 2007 If you were an Amigan, Fred Fish was well known to you. Responsible for the definitive archive of Amiga Freeware, Fred was the Santa Claus of software, his disks containing a selection of everything available for the Amiga at the time. Fish Disks inspired many an Amigan to purchase a modem and log on for all night bbs downloads of the vast selection available. Thanks and Rest in Peace Fred.
posted by djrock3k at 6:36 AM PST - 38 comments

"As he has before, Bush told the story about how his first presidential decision was to pick a rug for the Oval Office..." In a speech before Ohio High Schoolers and business leaders in a Republican district outside of Dayton, the President made some interesting commentary on marriage, chicken-plucking, polling, his own legacy, comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, and of course, the rug. Apparently, he loves the rug like Ronald Reagan loved Jelly Beans, talking about it all the time, even on the whitehouse.gov's video tour. Shortly after a President takes office, they make their own imprint on the character of the Oval Office by redecorating, a task usually taken by the First Lady. The rug, designed by Laura Bush is sunshine yellow, as the President stated he wanted the room to convey a sense of optimism, "because you can't make decisions unless you're optimistic that the decisions you make will lead to a better tomorrow." Hopefully the rug doesn't become a bookended anecdote to another Presidential "rising" sun.
posted by rzklkng at 5:51 AM PST - 58 comments

Child prodigies. (Just in case you were starting to feeling content with your middle-aged achievements.) [Warning: YouTube-heavy posting] [Warning: Chopin-heavy posting]
posted by humblepigeon at 3:12 AM PST - 35 comments

The year is 1978. A group of 12 year-olds have decided to make a Super 8 film of their own based on Jaws. Presenting... SHARK!
posted by miss lynnster at 11:39 PM PST - 33 comments

Half-handed Cloud upends the common conception of what Christian music should sound like. Part of a constellation of artists that include Brother Danielson and Sufjan Stevens, John Ringhofer crafts quirky, ramshackle indie pop songs with explicit Christian themes. Interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4. Reviews: 1, 2, 3. Videos: 1, 2, 3, 4.
posted by Falconetti at 10:59 PM PST - 60 comments

Torboto: The Robot That Tortures People.
posted by homunculus at 10:32 PM PST - 43 comments

The Super Sky Cycle is a convertible gyrocopter that lets you fly at better than freeway speeds, land in 20 feet, be driven home as a motorcycle, and fit in your garage. It is available now for a mere $37K. Check out the flight vid, the cool MacGyver soundtrack is extra though.
Note, yes, "Super" and "Cycle" might be stretches in the name of this product. But it is still pretty damned cool. via
posted by fenriq at 10:26 PM PST - 33 comments

Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio's 2004 Election Results --...more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website -- which gave the world the presidential election results -- was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors. ...
posted by amberglow at 7:44 PM PST - 66 comments

Citizen journalism is a form of fascism waiting to happen, suggests InfoWorld columnist Ephraim Schwartz.
posted by stbalbach at 7:43 PM PST - 53 comments

Meme Cats. 485 reasons why we don't have images here.
posted by ewagoner at 6:38 PM PST - 83 comments

A graphical dissertation of Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot". Consider the reasoning, first, of just "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly": Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? "You ain't 'cause you not" would seem to clear that up: It would appear that fly and hot are interchangable. If you are one, you are both; if you aren't at least one, you are neither.
posted by four panels at 6:33 PM PST - 33 comments

Make Bjork's next music video. She'd love for you to take a stab at making the video for Innocence (streaming music on her myspace page), if you're up to the challenge. Lyrics. Previously.
posted by MythMaker at 5:55 PM PST - 22 comments

David Halbertstam dead in tragic car accident. Experienced, eloquent, and always observant (his dim view of Patrick Ewing being a notable exception), David Halberstam was a journalistic jack-of-all-trades who was probably best known for his stinging indictment of Vietnam warrior Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ's secretary of defense, in the classic The Best and the Brightest. A superior war correspondent before the era of CNN-televised revolutions , Halberstam was also an excellent historian and sports writer. Halberstam's dense but illuminating The Fifties is an informative and tightly written study on the Eisenhower era. And The Children offers a compelling look at eight young leaders of the Civil Rights Revolution. Moreover, Halberstam's many writings on basketball (The Breaks of the Game, Playing for Keeps) and baseball (Summer of '49, October 1964) rank among the upper echelon of sports books.
posted by psmealey at 5:02 PM PST - 54 comments

Night Flight aired Friday and Saturday nights on the USA Network from 1981-1988 in the heady early days of cable. It was one of the first places to see shorts old and new, music documentaries, and conceptual, artistically-intended music videos -- not to mention MST3K-style parody, general weirdness, and 420-addled wonderfulness.
posted by Methylviolet at 3:37 PM PST - 64 comments

To honor the Greatest's birthday, one could consider his greatest work by reading this excellent post by matteo which touches upon the religious issues facing our confused Protestant hero, the student at Wittenberg, who doubts orthodoxy, cannot decide if he is a scourge or minister, but ultimately accedes to a belief in divine Providence. Or, if you would rather dive into an intriguing amusing royally f'ed up "unique" analysis of the play, check out this extensive theory (?) [cache] of Hamlet which corrects our accepted and flawed interpretation by explaining that a literal reading of the play tells us, among other things, that King Hamlet was never killed; that Horatio--our narrator--is the King's son and prince Hamlet's half brother; that the guy we incorrectly think of as Claudius is in fact King Hamlet; and that prince Hamlet's father is Fortinbras. Oops. Boy do we have egg on our faces.
posted by dios at 2:07 PM PST - 40 comments

Did John Chambers fake the Patterson Bigfoot Film? If it weren’t for John Landis’ big mouth, maybe no one would have figured out that John Chambers was the man behind the monkey suit in the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film. Of course Chambers denied it (and we’re still waiting to hear back from Landis).
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 1:45 PM PST - 22 comments

Ed Wood on Youtube: Glen or Glenda?, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster (from MST3k)
posted by darkripper at 1:20 PM PST - 26 comments

3-D images have a longer history than you might imagine. Stereographs were invented in the mid-1800s, and quickly became very popular. You can still view 3-D pictures of the Civil War, cowboys and Native Americans, World War I, Egypt circa 1900, small town America of the 19th century, and zeppelin wrecks(!). How do you view them? You can buy or build a viewer (like this classic), but a better way might be to learn to do it with the naked eye (try this method if you have trouble). A new technique converts stereograms into "wiggle images" [prev.] the approach has been used on this picture of a downed zeppelin and this picture from the Civil War. Free software will let you make your own wiggle images.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:42 PM PST - 23 comments

A 13 year old school girl is the new us text message champion. See how she crushed the competition btw her tiny thumbs.
posted by impolitic at 11:46 AM PST - 89 comments

Is this the future of non-satellite radio? So an old rock station flipped formats in the wee hours of the morning. "Lone Star 92.5 will not air traditional spots. Instead, the station will have 'sponsors' whose content will be integrated in throughout the hour [a la NPR]. Lone Star 92.5 will feature such artists as ZZ Top, The Old 97's, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and of course, Willie Nelson. In fact, the Red Headed Stranger will also serve as the voice of the station." This just might be the significant step it takes HD Radio to rise to the challenge of satellite radio. Those who claim to know radio cynically predict the new format will go down in flames. Maybe they just say that because it is a part of the universally reviled Clear Channel Communications.
posted by Doohickie at 11:29 AM PST - 22 comments

Thomas said he and his wife came up with the unprecedented idea to present the president with the Purple Heart over breakfast one morning a few months ago as they discussed the verbal attacks, both foreign and domestic, the commander in chief has withstood during his time in office. "We feel like emotional wounds and scars are as hard to carry as physical wounds," Thomas said.
posted by EarBucket at 11:24 AM PST - 133 comments

"I like to think that there'll always be a place in our universe where a kid can look and see reflected in the mirror an idealized form of themselves." Hero Deficit: Comics Books In Decline is an article, by freelance journalist Brad Mackay, exploring the challenges of superhero relevancy in a diverse society. Previous comic book and superhero-related posts on Metafilter. Wikipedia also has a very informative superhero page.
posted by amyms at 10:49 AM PST - 48 comments

Remember Mingering Mike? Dori Hadar, the man who found the amazing Mingering Mike collection, has written a book about his odyssey. Here is the spiffy, fleshed-out Mingering Mike official site. And here's an interview with Hadar. [Previously 1, 2.]
posted by veronica sawyer at 9:25 AM PST - 6 comments

Obesity and the Farm Bill. Michael Pollan continues his series of articles on the state of the American food supply by looking at the connection between the obesity epidemic and the federal farm bill (NYT, reg. required, blah blah blah). Previously.
posted by dw at 9:09 AM PST - 68 comments

Sgt. Alvin C. York was the most decorated individual US Soldier in WWI. Subject of the top grossing movie of 1941, He was credited with capturing 138 German soldiers nearly single handedly by flanking a Machine gun nest, and killing its occupants. The Machine gun in question may be destroyed because the library that owns it does not have a proper license.
posted by Gungho at 8:25 AM PST - 41 comments

Europeans love to bash American chocolate - especially Hershey's - almost as much as the like to bash, erm, America in general (apparently, it tastes like doggie treats). Recently, Big Chocolate have asked the FDA if they can stop using real cocoa butter in the chocolate-making process, which can only make it taste even worse. I often wonder how many so-called chocoholics know that most of the chocolate they eat was probably picked by slave labour in West Africa. Child slaves, even. Meh, they probably don't care: research indicates that chocolate is 'four times better than kissing'. Never trust a junkie.
posted by chuckdarwin at 8:24 AM PST - 128 comments

Apache. The greatest song for an action movie ever made. The 1977 Disco Version? It's hard to say.
posted by Alex404 at 7:55 AM PST - 39 comments

Yeltsin said: "I want to beg forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. And also I would like to beg forgiveness not to have justified your hopes." Boris Yeltsin is dead. [AP story]
posted by nickyskye at 7:54 AM PST - 58 comments

marzipan.
posted by Dave Faris at 7:52 AM PST - 56 comments

Singer Sheryl Crow: "I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting." She continues: "...only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required". Sheryl also recommends we replace wasteful paper napkins with her ingenious "detachable dining sleeve". Is she pulling our leg? She must be: the BBC fell for it...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:58 AM PST - 106 comments

“I wanted to try to capture the intelligence of the design, not just the outcome of the design.” “In 1977, [Donald] Knuth halted research on his books for what he expected to be a one-year hiatus. Instead, it took 10. Accompanied by [his wife] Jill, Knuth took design classes from Stanford art professor Matthew Kahn. Knuth, trying to train his programmer’s brain to think like an artist’s, wanted to create a program [TeX] that would understand why each stroke in a typeface would be pleasing to the eye.”—from a profile of Knuth in the Stanford Magazine (May '06). Salon calls him “computing’s philosopher king” (Sep '99). NPR’s Morning Edition interviews Knuth as “the founding artist of computer science” (Mar '05). Perhaps a MeFite somewhere has one of these? (Previously)
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 4:34 AM PST - 40 comments

Super Mario Bros. in 5'32'
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:36 PM PST - 44 comments

This life-like movie sequence captures Saturn's rings during a ring plane crossing--which Cassini makes twice per orbit--from the spacecraft's point of view. The movie begins with a view of the sunlit side of the rings. As the spacecraft speeds from south to north, the rings appear to tilt downward and collapse to a thin plane, and then open again to reveal the un-illuminated side of the ring plane, where sunlight filters through only dimly.

The Great Crossing -- The Movie (7 MB)
posted by y2karl at 10:35 PM PST - 13 comments

Samples of the Javanese gamelan The Museum Nusantara Delft in the Netherlands recorded its century-old gamelan, Kyahi Paridjata, note by note. Most of the instruments in the orchestra are included. Samples are available as MP3, but the museum also includes the original files and some variants.
posted by NemesisVex at 9:04 PM PST - 20 comments

Claude Bell's giant Cabazon Dinosaurs sculptures have been bought by a Christian developer, Answers in Genesis. The LA Times (archived copy) discusses.
posted by lilithim at 8:38 PM PST - 33 comments

Carlos Latuff is a political cartoonist from Brazil whose work can be described as pro-Palestine , anti-America and uh, anti-McDonalds?. He has given his side of the story, but his latest images on DeviantArt take a different direction in his anti-American artwork.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:15 PM PST - 54 comments

The Jewish Boy Band - Chai 5. Yes they're serious. And there are only four of them.
posted by brookeb at 6:30 PM PST - 23 comments

Common chimps like early humans
posted by Listener at 6:23 PM PST - 16 comments

SHOOT THINGS - a retro-arcade-style shooter for Mac OS X. The author's page describes how it was written in 3 weeks for a contest - it's entertained me for considerably longer than that.
posted by ikkyu2 at 5:10 PM PST - 31 comments

It's been covered elsewhere in the media (and on MetaFilter) before, but Jason DeParle's feature in the NY Times Magazine this weekend is a well-researched, clearly written, and evocative piece on the phenomenon of the Filipino overseas contract worker. Just don't get him confused with a balikbayan (who has a cultural spot all his own, with boxes named in his honor).
posted by sappidus at 4:53 PM PST - 6 comments

Nerds, Nine Inch Nails, and numbskulls. It's also an ARG.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 4:49 PM PST - 14 comments

Flickr user gandibacardi really likes women's cardigans. So much that he takes pictures of himself wearing cardigans and puts heads of models over his own face. He then writes (presumably) fictional mini-stories in the captions. He also likes to talk about cardigans. Sometimes he posts links to his pictures asking people what they think of his pictures. Sometimes he gets answers, but most often not.
posted by Kattullus at 4:15 PM PST - 44 comments

Good news if you want another source of antioxidants in your diet.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 3:26 PM PST - 29 comments

"Hey, do any of you people who are leaving want to stay and talk about this or do you want to run out like cowards?" [YouTube] Over 80 people simultaneously walked out of Mike Daisey's recent performance of Invincible Summer. One of the people came onstage and poured water over his only copy of the show's outline. "And it wounded me in my heart, because I trusted these people."
posted by kirkaracha at 3:14 PM PST - 139 comments

An average of 81 people die of gunshot wounds in the US each day. Most of them aren't who you'd expect.
posted by alms at 2:05 PM PST - 143 comments

The first was found just fifteen years ago, after centuries of speculation. As of today, we're up to 227 and counting. Most are just wobbles in data, but we have pictures and exotica too. And we are looking for more (although some think we shouldn't look very hard and others are drawing some surprising conclusions). The science and technology of finding the most fascinating and elusive types demands some of the cleverest engineering, yet you can even have a go for yourself. Previously on Metafilter
posted by Devonian at 12:46 PM PST - 21 comments

No fairytales allowed; Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has 36 clients in Guantanamo and has visited many times. This is an extract from a new book where he argues that secrecy is a disease. A further extract explors the surreal world of the prison's media relations, where the only journalist with real access is one of the inmates. Stafford Smith was one of the narrators is this excellent recent FPP. Here is the site of his UK organisation.
posted by adamvasco at 12:43 PM PST - 6 comments

Recent MeFi threads have suggested how easy it is (or not) to build a gun. The comparison to dynamite or ANFO is made, frequently, in these sorts of discussions, supposedly to illustrate another "weapon" which is in the public corpus but largely outlawed. [more inside]
posted by avriette at 12:29 PM PST - 34 comments

Reid Stowe and Soanya Ahmad have embarked on a 1000 day journey aboard a 60 foot schooner named Anne which Reid built. They will remain beyond sight of land and will not be resupplied during the voyage. Reid has considerable experience as a sailor, having first sailed at 20 to Tahiti from Hawaii...and later building a a catamaran which he sailed across the Atlantic.
posted by rmmcclay at 12:26 PM PST - 11 comments

Super(-expensive) Playgrounds are nice to look at, but what makes a playground fun? Experiments in play: Snug & Outdoor (1, 2, 3) Mcdonald's (1, 2, 3) KaBOOM! (1, 2, 3) Boundless Play (1, 2, 3)
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:20 AM PST - 34 comments

Australian inventor Chris Bosua, frustrated by the inefficiency of his air compressor, devised a method of recycling the exhaust air from air tools. His Exhausted Air Recycling System (E.A.R.S.) improves efficiency by eighty percent. It runs cooler, almost halves the power consumption, extends the life of the compressor, provides a cleaner working environment, and reduces the noise of an air tool to that of a sewing machine. Happy Earth Day, everyone!
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 10:05 AM PST - 31 comments

Powerful photo ads for the Cape Times.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:57 AM PST - 65 comments

Went to a dance, looking for a man, found John McCain, he was singing Bomb Iran. (Warnings: Single link YouTube Newsfilter)
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:33 AM PST - 43 comments

Recent scientific evidence suggests the Minoa civilization on Crete was wiped out by a massive tidal wave around 1,500 BC, the same time the Santorini volcano erupted, 70 km north of Crete, up to ten times more powerful than the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. "Perhaps we now have an explanation of [the Atlantis myth] - a folk memory of a real ancient civilisation swallowed by the sea."
posted by stbalbach at 9:15 AM PST - 22 comments

Orpheus and Eurydice, the acid-tinged, animated music video version.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:48 AM PST - 8 comments

Goodbye Jacques! Today french voters will get rid of Chirac - charmingly called "The Bulldozer". Although he was not as bad as Silvio, France is in dire need of economic reform - something Frau Merkel has already started in Germany. So who will win this important election? Meet the candidates: Royal, Sarkozy and Bayrou.
posted by homodigitalis at 2:58 AM PST - 53 comments

Rich Little was selected (vid link on that page is dead) to headline the White House Correspondents Dinner this year, no doubt to avoid the kind of controversy created last year's headliner, Stephen Colbert. Seems like it was also a way to avoid any type of humor as well! Although no video of the event is yet available online (as far as I can see), an earlier YouTube video accurately predicted the result. An example: 5 minutes to set up this ancient, unfunny, joke. I wish I was kidding.
posted by The Deej at 10:49 PM PST - 110 comments

32 Edible Insect Foods You Can Buy Online including such delicacies as Roasted Pregnant Crickets, Preserved Bamboo Worms in Salt Water Brine, and Preserved Weaver Ants Eggs. Not safe for insectophobes.
posted by SansPoint at 10:16 PM PST - 31 comments

Mariah Carey album covers in Saudi Arabia. These appear to be genuine, not a hoax (although the album covers on the Megastar website don't appear to have been changed). From the comments on the post: Actually, I think she looks better in the covered up pictures. Via Mini ZuD.
posted by russilwvong at 10:00 PM PST - 62 comments

Thomas Sutpen is one of Faulkner's most complex and intriguing characters. His blog, If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats includes nostalgic collections of rare photographs in serial form. Samples: They Were Collaborators (298) Great Con Artists of the 20th Century (14) Vietnam - Dramatis Personae (7) A is for Arbus (37) Collect 'em All (26) The Golden Age of Prurience (37) Poets are both clean and warm (18). Many wonderful others on the sidebar.
posted by growabrain at 9:57 PM PST - 12 comments

In light of all of the recent genre-crossing cover posts on MetaFilter [1, 2], here's another. The Puppini Sisters cover such classics as Wuthering Heights, Heart of Glass and I Will Survive in 1940s style jazz. Enjoy.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 9:23 PM PST - 11 comments

Charles Phoenix's Disneyland Tour of Downtown Los Angeles... featuring Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. Feel like taking your own walking tour of Downtown? Here you go. But hey, why not stop and gorge yourself on a giant pancake breakfast at The Pantry first, just because? Open 24 hours a day, it hasn't closed since 1924 so the doors don't even have locks. Just like Disneyland!
posted by miss lynnster at 9:04 PM PST - 25 comments

Just days after the Virgina Tech massacre and subsequent discussions on the pros and cons of gun control, a NASA contract engineer shot his coworker today on charges that his performance review was bad. A woman was held hostage by being tied to a chair during this episode. He brought the gun to work after printing out his performance review. NASA intends to increase security even as increased campus security is being discussed. How do we prevent more such shootings, asks the president.
posted by infini at 8:55 PM PST - 149 comments

Between 1942 and 1944 the German military erected a gigantic defensive wall along the Atlantic coast, running from France to Norway: more than 12.000 concrete bunkers were built. What remains of the Atlantikwall in Normandy. The Atlantic Wall Linear Museum. The Atlantic Wall and D-Day.
posted by nickyskye at 8:30 PM PST - 13 comments

When a Brain Forgets Where Memory Is. Interesting article on dissociative fugue, the poorly understood memory disorder where people seem to forget who they are. [Via MindHacks.]
posted by homunculus at 5:04 PM PST - 45 comments

In a parallel universe Your Favorite Band Really Does Suck! Duncan Watts and others conducted a Web-based experiment [PDF] called Music Lab. Their findings: "while talent might distinguish good from bad, social pressure and pure dumb luck are also big influences on which bands gain the most fame." "Calling the [experiment] 'pathbreaking,' sociologist Michael Macy of Cornell University says the findings illustrate how a small advantage can snowball, making popularity hard to predict. Economist Robert Frank, also at Cornell, says the work shows 'we're all susceptible to the herd mentality.'" The effect of "cumulative advantage" has impact on the popularity of other aspects of contemporary culture: books, films, websites and more.
posted by ericb at 4:59 PM PST - 41 comments

Prominent cosmologist Simon D.M. White has written a provocative paper posted to the astrophysics arxiv complaining that too much time is being devoted to the quest to understand the nature of the elusive dark energy: "Dark Energy is undeniably an interesting problem to attack through astronomical observation, but it is one of many and not necessarily the one where significant progress is most likely to follow a major investment of resources." He worries generally that observational cosmology/astrophysics/astronomy may turn away from the construction of instruments of general utility (such as the Hubble Space Telescope), to concentrate on a small number of massive experiments narrowly focused on solving particular problems (such as WMAP and the Large Hadron Collider), to the detriment of the "quirky small-science" type of astronomy.
posted by snoktruix at 2:06 PM PST - 8 comments

Atlas Gloves: A DIY hand gesture interface for Google Earth.
posted by brundlefly at 2:04 PM PST - 18 comments

Blogging for the technically challenged.
posted by bobbyelliott at 10:40 AM PST - 54 comments

In 1957, Swiss typographer Max Miedinger invented "the official typeface of the 20th century" -- Helvetica [previously discussed here, via Arts and Letters Daily].
posted by digaman at 10:07 AM PST - 43 comments

The Particle Adventure.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 8:06 AM PST - 14 comments

Challenge of the Super Duper Friends looks great, judging from the teaser trailer. Obama as Captain United is probably my favorite.
posted by mathowie at 7:41 AM PST - 25 comments

A modern day Mary Celeste. A ship has been found adrift near the Great Barrier Reef... without her crew. The engine was idling, the table was set, and all the expensive kit was still on board (pirates surely would've gutted the place). The mast was ripped and the life rafts were missing. It's looking less and less likely that three sailors will be found alive. Where is Jack Ryan when you need him?
posted by chuckdarwin at 7:18 AM PST - 48 comments

From 1970 to 2004 Michael P. Smith photographed musicians in performance at every New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. With an excellent sense of timing, Smith was adept at capturing the exultant, transcendant musical moment. Whether they be of the very famous or the relatively unknown, his are photographs you can practically hear.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:17 AM PST - 29 comments

32 things you can do with beer. (Besides drink it.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:35 PM PST - 25 comments

Ziggy the Bagman (real name Zbygnew Marian Willzek) is a 46 year old man who has long lived on the streets of Brisbane, gaining notoriety for the large collection of bags he carries with him at all times (unless they're being seized by the authorities). He's resisted all attempts to get him a home, preferring to sleep rough due to (as this interview with Ziggy relates) a desire to practice self-control of body and mind mixed with religious reasons. This is in spite of several attacks on him, every one of which he says he remembers very clearly. Although many have written of him, and created MySpace pages in his honor (though one wonder how honored Ziggy would actually be if he knew about it), he remains arguably the most well known face of Australia's growing homelessness crisis (PDF file).

It is probably quite difficult for many to imagine what it would actually be like to be homeless, although for your edification here is an excellent site detailing a day in the life of six other homeless people in six cities around the world from Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC. I'm sure Ziggy would have appeared in the movie too, but no doubt the $10 fee he would have asked for would have been too steep for the ABC.
posted by Effigy2000 at 10:21 PM PST - 37 comments

The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis. In 1978, renowned structural engineer William LeMessurier discovered a mistake in his design for the Citicorp (now Citigroup) Center. With hurricane season approaching, the skyscraper was in imminent danger of collapse. His handling of the situation has been praised as a "stunning example of good ethics in action" – but some disagree.
posted by smably at 9:43 PM PST - 45 comments

Body Farm Background: green burial
posted by Listener at 9:37 PM PST - 15 comments

An entire realm chained and locked shut. Who shall inherit all the lost souls? (Especially since it apparently contains everyone who died before the coming of Christ.)
posted by aletheia at 8:33 PM PST - 83 comments

The familiar story of 20th century philosophy is one of analytic versus continental philosophies. In spite of this, behind the exaggerated differences is the common history that these two traditions often forget. In failing to remember this common history, it's easy to forget that for all its supposed universality, philosophy is so distinctly western. It's naive to think that this narrow-mindedness is due to western intellectuals being unable to hear the wisdoms of the world over the din of their own arguments. Rather, it is only that these wordly traditions don’t have that flavour – that hardness of crystal. [more inside]
posted by Alex404 at 8:25 PM PST - 20 comments

All this scratchin' is makin' me itch.
posted by phrontist at 6:08 PM PST - 26 comments

Five For Fighting (John Ondrasik) is pretty cool and has some good music (enbedded audio). This video, created by school kids, really rocks. You can watch and submit your own home vids for in support of some good charitable causes.
posted by snsranch at 5:54 PM PST - 7 comments

Shaadi mubarak! The most beautiful woman in the world was married today. Aishwarya Rai and Abshishek Bachchan, two of India's most popular actors, tied the knot in Mumbai, amid tight security. While a comparatively modest affair, it was not without drama. Oh, you weren't invited? Well, you can still watch the bride and groom dance -- with the father-in-law, too.
posted by Methylviolet at 5:01 PM PST - 92 comments

[Joe] Namath learned to drink as a youngster, back home in Beaver Falls. You could say he developed a taste for hooch as an infant— when he got fussy while teething his mother rubbed his gums with a rag soaked in grain alcohol. (via SpoFi, another story of a great athlete/drunkard)
posted by mr_crash_davis at 4:52 PM PST - 29 comments

Make the logo bigger. (mp3) The fine folks at Speak Up provide a bit more explanation. One can only assume that the follow-up hit will be entitled either 'Split the Difference' or 'The Client Loved It, But They're Changing Everything.'
posted by ba at 4:31 PM PST - 42 comments

First a goose, then Sigourney and now really old diamonds. A diamond field in Northern Ontario, Canada has turned up a 1.5 Carat diamond from what is believed to be the world's oldest diamond deposit at 2.697 billion years old. The diamonds were found, of all places, just 12 kilometers from the small town of Wawa, Ontario (www.wawa.cc) - previously famous for being home to the world's biggest goose and filming location of the 2006 film Snow Cake starring Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver.
posted by empatterson at 2:43 PM PST - 36 comments

The Children of Húrin is the first complete book by J.R.R. Tolkien in three decades, co-written by his son Christopher. His grandson Adam Tolkein explains how it came about. The Washington Post gives a great review.
posted by stbalbach at 1:55 PM PST - 58 comments

"The Pigeons Won't Know What Hit Them" Robop .: Intelligent Bird Control for the third millennium.
posted by Stynxno at 1:20 PM PST - 17 comments

The gangsters that rule Hip Hop are the same gangsters that rule our nation. An open letter to Oprah Winfrey about misogyny and the gangsta chic in rap and hip hop, now under scrutiny in a post-Imus world. (via Poetry Foundation)
posted by John of Michigan at 12:22 PM PST - 70 comments

I Love Vermont
posted by james_cpi at 12:16 PM PST - 50 comments

Shift happens. Thought-provoking, powerpoint-ish, reference-free, Friday Fun.
posted by HyperBlue at 11:43 AM PST - 46 comments

Rare and strange cloud formations. Mammatus, lenticular, noctilucent, nacreous, hole in the sky. Basic cloud guide.
posted by nickyskye at 10:09 AM PST - 43 comments

Last year, one of the last of the independent magazine distributors, Independent Press Association, went out of business (and took many smaller magazines along in its wake), and those who have survived, like Punk Planet, now depend on its subscription base for revenue. Now, a proposed postal hike, which favors magazines with larger circulations, could be the final nail in the coffin for some of the little guys.
posted by pfafflin at 9:07 AM PST - 25 comments

"The church of global free trade, which rules American politics with infallible pretensions, may have finally met its Martin Luther." A thorough summary in The Nation of the brilliant but ignored Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests by Ralph Gomory, former IBM Senior Vice President for Science and winner of the National Medal of Science. His heresy? Arguing, with supporting technical and economic data, that multinational corporations and their home countries have divergent interests in shipping skilled labor and advanced technologies overseas, and that this "divergence" is a net negative for the American economy and the American public. Globalization, he argues, has its losers, the United States paramount among them.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:53 AM PST - 76 comments

“We consider the 'primitive' music of blues singers such as Leadbelly to be more authentic than that of the Monkees. But all pop musicians are fakes . . . Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor . . . have turned out their personal record collections to produce a persuasive defence of inauthenticity as the defining characteristic of great popular music[.]” (via)
posted by jason's_planet at 7:58 AM PST - 141 comments

Ultimate Jukebox
posted by konolia at 7:26 AM PST - 27 comments

The commonly held belief that women talk more than men is apparently a fabrication. The truth: "No reputable study has ever measured the widely repeated numerical comparisons that show women talking two or three times as much as men."
posted by 2shay at 7:16 AM PST - 96 comments

I support gun control, but for 82-year-old Miss America Venus Ramey, I make an exception. The first redhead and the only native Kentuckian ever to be Miss America, she's pretty fearsome with a snub-nosed .38.
posted by tizzie at 5:32 AM PST - 114 comments

The Independent's headline actually uses the word 'obliterated'. I like this quote from the stuffed shirts at Travel for London - "We recognise that there are those who view Banksy's work as legitimate art, but sadly our graffiti removal teams are staffed by professional cleaners, not professional art critics." This Reuters article reckons the mural was worth £250,000. This isn't an excellent photo of the mural before it was whitewashed, but it's the only one I could find (Flickr). Do Banksy's pieces create an atmosphere of "neglect and social decay" or are they valuable pieces of art that should be preserved? These folks were so upset that the prospective buyers of their house in Bristol were going to paint over one of his pieces that they've changed the terms of sale. "The owners consider it a work of art and want it kept as it is. They came to us to help sell it as a mural with a house attached."
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:03 AM PST - 76 comments

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971). This film based on the pro-Jesus/anti-Commie teachings of Baptist minister Dr. Estus Washington Pirkle (3/12/1930–3/3/05) warns what will happen to America if the citizens do not give up their depraved ways and turn to God and Jesus for salvation. Fun for the whole family! Also by Reverend Pirkle: The Burning Hell & The Believer's Heaven. Good times.
posted by miss lynnster at 12:56 AM PST - 22 comments

Happy Birthday, Jack Chick! Belated Birthday Greetings! The undisputed king of kings of Christian Comic literature, the inventor of “Chick Tracts” -- Jack is 83 years young this year and still cranking out those little comics So where is the love?! Finally some films are being made of his work: "Titanic" “The Thief” "One Way" and "La Princesita" are but a few. The question remains -- Can any of these every surpass Jack’s own masterwork "The Light Of The World"
posted by Strawman at 12:32 AM PST - 59 comments

Thou shalt not make a one-link YouTube post. Unless, you know, it's something good.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:54 PM PST - 98 comments

Iranian Supreme Court Acquits Murderers Because They Killed the "Morally Corrupt" "Iran's Islamic penal code...says murder charges can be dropped if the accused can prove the killing was done because the victim was morally corrupt. ... This is true even if the killer mistakenly identified the victim as corrupt. ... examples of moral corruption that do permit bloodshed, including armed banditry, adultery by a wife and insults to the Prophet Muhammad."
posted by shivohum at 10:47 PM PST - 25 comments

Introduced to Western culture by the Beatles in their single Norwegian Wood, the sitar has featured prominently in North Indian classical music for centuries. Princeton-based computer scientist Ajay Kapur updates the instrument with his ESitar, an audio and video controller that uses gesture input (PDF) and machine learning algorithms to facilitate joining the computer with Ajay in his sitar performance. Undergraduate engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania work from the other direction, building RAVI-bot, an award-winning, self-playing robotic sitar (YouTube) programmed to generate music from classical Raga scales and melodies all on its own. For those in the Philadelphia area, be sure to check out a live performance of RAVI-bot at the local Klein Art Gallery.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:25 PM PST - 32 comments

The Obselisk. The bastard child of a Mensa quiz and rattan furniture. Getting apart is probably ok, but I don't want to put it back together - particularly after drinky-poo's. But certainly a talking point - particularly at $9,890 . Via
posted by ninazer0 at 8:36 PM PST - 18 comments

People In Newspaper Ads Who Look Like They're Farting. From The West Virginia Surf Report, a blog and webzine with a little bit of everything to tickle your funny bone, or offend you, depending on your point of view. Other features include Black Box Stew: Who would you like to see go down in the next big air disaster?, Rules Of Thumb, and Fast Food Ads Vs. Reality, with lots more in the Archives and the Best Of page.
posted by amyms at 8:31 PM PST - 34 comments

Frances Glessner Lee (previously discussed here) was a pioneer in forensic studies who built reproductions of crime scenes in dollhouses. Photographs of the dioramas, courtesy of Corinne May Botz.[More Inside] [viaATNY]
posted by grapefruitmoon at 8:21 PM PST - 8 comments

A tale of the Polish resistance, radio astronomers, and the nearly 25 year-old ZX Spectrum computer (youtube; some links open with nice music)(via, previously)
posted by acro at 6:14 PM PST - 18 comments

Gil! Scott! Heron!
posted by Kattullus at 5:16 PM PST - 32 comments

"This is the message I took to the President" US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today in response to reporters questions about his meeting with President Bush. "I believe myself that this war is lost and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday."
posted by Second Account For Making Jokey Comments at 3:55 PM PST - 93 comments

Move over, crazy-pilotless-drone-guy. Alec Baldwin busts out the brass balls on his 11-year old daughter.
posted by phaedon at 3:23 PM PST - 150 comments

Click here for nothing When you're online doing nothing, and there's nothing to see, nothing to read, and nothing to buy, you might as well settle for nothing.
posted by Tommy Gnosis at 2:08 PM PST - 38 comments

Tappity is a free guide to mobile-friendly sites. From your browser, you can search for or add sites, and rate sites in the database. You can also set up a homepage of favorite links. This is displayed when you navigate to Tappity from your mobile. It's a seemingly simple idea that's been making my train commute fly by.
posted by ba at 1:01 PM PST - 2 comments

The always-excellent (and MeFi fave) Jonathan Coulton, inspired by Alanis Morissette's cover of My Humps from a few weeks ago, has done a marvelously droll cover of You Oughta Know.
posted by shiu mai baby at 11:54 AM PST - 52 comments

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is in the middle of his testimony before Congress on firing of eight US Attorneys. The questioning has gotten heated at times, and TPM Muckraker has many highlights from the testimony. DailyKos has been giddily blogging live, and there are many sites carrying the live video feed. Conservative blogs have been mysteriously quiet about this.
posted by OldReliable at 11:37 AM PST - 187 comments

Harry Whittier Frees — "These unusual photographs of real animals were made possible only by patient, unfailing kindness on the part of the photographer at all times."
posted by cerebus19 at 11:04 AM PST - 23 comments

”Björk's album covers have always been visual feasts, reflecting the spirit of the music inside while helping to maintain Björk's status as a brilliant artist.” Artwork released for Björk’s upcoming album, Volta, was widely assumed to be the new cover. Thus, the official cover that’s been revealed has divided, dismayed, amused, or delighted fans and critics all over the place in the past couple of weeks. Pitchfork interviews Björk herself on the album-cover and more, and she talks about the making of Volta here: Part I, Part II (YouTube).
posted by hermitosis at 10:12 AM PST - 69 comments

He fought battles on the Plain of Jars, hid his rebel faction in caves for nine years to escape U.S bombs and now has a huge museum in Vientiane. Laos' Kaysone Phomvihane is not the most well documented 20th century communist leader. And not everybody is happy about him of course. But if you want to judge him for yourself go to Laos and visit those caves or visit his humble residence and have a look at his tennis shoes.
posted by PHINC at 10:10 AM PST - 10 comments

Although there is something appealing about large models in the Lego world, such as a 3,000+ piece Star Destroyer, there is a bonsai-like appeal to mini- and micro- scene creations, such as Chris Deck's approach to modelling the same Star Destroyer in just seventeen pieces. Through clever and unorthodox thinking, a menacing 5 story tall AT-AT can be produced in in a mere 41 pieces.
posted by boo_radley at 9:56 AM PST - 33 comments

Alan Rayner Making the case for Inclusionality.
posted by RoseyD at 9:46 AM PST - 36 comments

Massive tunnels for peace. Russia is considering building a tunnel under the Bering Strait that would include pipelines, high-speed rails, and a highway, though earlier plans have not gotten far, at least for the last ten millennia. Another large tunnel project under consideration that hopes to encourage mutual understanding is the Red-Dead Canal, which would irrigate the deserts of Jordan and Israel, generate electricity, and refill the Dead Sea using water flowing from the Red Sea to the lowest point on Earth.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:16 AM PST - 29 comments

Take this cooked with this and mix it with these and these and this, top it off these?!?, smother it in this and you have this: كشري. Pronounced kusharī, you can also find it spelled kushary, koushari, koushary, koshari, or koshary. However you spell it, it is one of Egypt's most popular dishes. Throughout Cairo you can find restaurants devoted this this humble, cheap (a filling bowl costs 3LE, around 50 cents), usually vegetarian dish. Of course, if you're not in Cairo you can always make your own.
posted by Deathalicious at 8:04 AM PST - 47 comments

A Polite Letter from the Smithsonian
posted by Stynxno at 7:58 AM PST - 50 comments

Metal by Numbers by Brian Posehn
posted by psmealey at 7:27 AM PST - 30 comments

In the year 1900, Ladies Home Journal writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr wrote an article entitled What May Happen In The Next 100 Years". This is apparently what the most learned, conservative men of the "greatest institutions of science and learning" had to say about the coming hundred years.
posted by antifuse at 7:03 AM PST - 99 comments

"Fortunately nobody was using the toilets when the fire broke out and there were no injuries," a company spokesman said. "The fire would have been just under your buttocks." The flaming toilets of Japan! Of course, if these kinds of problems with new-fangled techno-toilets continue, people might be advised to go back to the traditional Japanese toilet. In which case, this refresher course in How to Use Japanese Style Toilet Bowel [sic] might come in handy. Happy squatting!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:06 AM PST - 24 comments

if you've not heard of the book "confessions of an economic hitman", then these few videos are gonna put your chins on the floor. it is disturbing how much the guy looks like george the second.
posted by 6am at 4:07 AM PST - 48 comments

The Compleat Steve has a number of articles written by Steve Martin. I especially liked A Public Apology, How I Joined Mensa, and Writing Is Easy!
posted by supercrayon at 9:06 PM PST - 60 comments

How Do You Get Crabs From A Gorilla? One of many little evolutionary cases Carl Zimmer tackles in The Parasite Files.
posted by homunculus at 8:19 PM PST - 28 comments

Suicide food. Yep, some animals just have an inexplicable death wish. Classic. Creepy. Cute. Sporty. Disturbingly sexy. Just plain confusing. These animals all have one thing in common. They're freakin' tasty.
posted by miss lynnster at 8:14 PM PST - 43 comments

An assassin with alleged links to the underworld shot and killed the mayor of Nagasaki yesterday. Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito was a tireless anti-nuclear proliferation activist who travelled the world to spread his pacifist message and help serve witness to the horrors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His comments during bombing anniversaries have criticized the United States as well as North Korea and Iran for contributing to proliferation.
posted by stagewhisper at 7:45 PM PST - 20 comments

Vonnegut's Asshole. To be honest, this wasn't originally intended as a tribute to the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. It started as a goofy experiment, just to find out how many authors I could persuade to send me drawings of their own assholes. But then Kurt went and died on us last week. So now it's become something else.
posted by roll truck roll at 7:04 PM PST - 19 comments

The International Music Score Library Project. PDF downloads of public domain classical music scores. From solo piano to full symphony orchestra. 2,762 works and counting.
posted by chrismear at 6:34 PM PST - 12 comments

JGuitar, a rather useful tool for those learning the guitar or experimenting with alternate tunings. You can even bookmark a certain tuning.
posted by signal at 5:41 PM PST - 6 comments

A young mother and her son's losing battle with cancer in twenty photographs. Renee C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature and deservedly so. If you find these photgraphs as moving as I do, let me just go ahead and point you to the National Childhood Cancer Foundation and the Hospice Foundation of America.
posted by Heminator at 4:11 PM PST - 81 comments

The 15 most outrageous claims in pop music history.
posted by jbickers at 3:06 PM PST - 85 comments

Nazi Robot Attack
posted by kirkaracha at 1:23 PM PST - 56 comments

Gliders spearheaded many major invasions and other operations in the European theatre of World War II, including the invasion of Normandy. I had no idea, but it turns out the House of Representatives recently passed a resolution honoring the glider pilots, and there's a Silent Wings Museum in Lubbock, TX. The World War II Glider Pilots Association site gives more background on the men, the planes, and the missions, as well as the memorable title quote. There's even a movie. [More Inside]
posted by Mister_A at 1:19 PM PST - 27 comments

...By refusing to recognize or admit that the Vietnam War was from its inception primarily a civil war, and not part of a larger, centrally-directed international conspiracy, policymakers assumed that North Vietnam was, like the United States, waging a limited war, and therefore that it would be prepared to settle for something less than total victory (especially if confronted by military stalemate on the ground in the South and the threat of aerial bombardment of the North). In so making this assumption, policymakers not only ignored two millennia of Vietnamese history, but also excused themselves from confronting the harsh truth that civil wars are, for their indigenous participants, total wars, and that no foreign participant in someone else's civil war can possibly have as great a stake in the conflict's outcome--and attendant willingness to sacrifice--as do the indigenous parties involved.

The Wrong War - Why We Lost in Vietnam
See also Who Lost Vietnam ?
See also Vietnam in Retrospect: Could We Have Won?
posted by y2karl at 11:24 AM PST - 77 comments

Learning From Ike: What a Republican realist could teach George Bush. "If we hope to succeed, we manage evil. We minimize, mitigate, and manipulate evil. But efforts to pre-emptively eliminate evil are prone to end in overreaction and destabilization, with consequences that are often worse than the original problem."
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:01 AM PST - 36 comments

If you took the concept of a cat scratching post, and replaced "cat" with "Horny Dog" and "Scratching Post" with "Hollowed Out Fuckdoll," you'd have the Hotdoll.
posted by jonson at 10:18 AM PST - 77 comments

The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. My favorites for 2007 are International Reporting, National Reporting, Editorial Cartooning (one example, and another), and Breaking News Photo. The Pulitzer site archive is an amazing source of browsing material. Unfortunately, it is not the easiest site to navigate. So here are some previous winners: 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000
posted by McGuillicuddy at 9:46 AM PST - 23 comments

14-century old Japanese business folds. How often does one get to type that?
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:45 AM PST - 32 comments

Rivers And Tides sic transit gloria mundi
posted by vronsky at 9:38 AM PST - 27 comments

Etch-a-Sketch art by etchy, Flickr set; by Michael McNevin; by Wanderline. D.I.Y. Brainwave Etch-a-Sketch. How it works.
posted by nickyskye at 9:26 AM PST - 16 comments

The inaugural edition of Open Medicine, a peer-reviewed, independent, open-access medical journal is now available online. The online medical journal launched in the aftermath of a rift last year between some editors and the publisher of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Among the first interesting articles? a review of studies which suggests that health outcomes may be superior in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States (but differences are not consistent), even though spending is higher south of the border.
posted by furtive at 9:22 AM PST - 6 comments

Photographs of Manhattan 1964-1969 By Irwin Klein. Immigrants, storefronts, gangs, mafiosi, street scenes. More Klein here. My fave. First link via
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:20 AM PST - 19 comments

A look back at the NC2000, a short history of the one of the first photojournalist-quality digicams. [via]
posted by Armitage Shanks at 6:57 AM PST - 18 comments

Do you want to look hard but can't stand the needle? Detachable Tattoo Sleeves are the answer. Unfortunately, small is out of stock at the moment.
posted by tellurian at 6:34 AM PST - 50 comments

A Moment on Earth: hundreds of pictures of different places on earth, all taken at exactly the same time (Flash Based). On August 5th, 2004 at 12:00 Noon GMT, 60 filmmakers in over 40 countries and on all 7 continents captured a single "moment" on earth. The results were used to build a composite image of Iraq and the Pacific Ocean. By hovering over the composite image, the individual frames of the mosiac can be viewed along with details about the individual pictures.
posted by Mave_80 at 5:54 AM PST - 14 comments

How To Talk To Girls At Parties by Neil Gaiman. Full text and reading by the author: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 3:48 AM PST - 39 comments

Word is that the DGSE - the French secret intelligence service - knew in January 2001 that al Queda was planning to hijack a US aircraft and may have given warning. (The original article that appeared in Le Monde 2 days ago)
posted by pwedza at 1:11 AM PST - 48 comments

Body Symmetry and Intelligence
posted by Gyan at 12:30 AM PST - 37 comments

Le Reve and Me is a blog dedicated to one man's experience with a poster of Picasso's Le Reve, the original of which was sold at Christie's and subsequently (and accidentally) damaged by owner Steve Wynn. [another excellent Picasso post from the archives!]
posted by grapefruitmoon at 11:50 PM PST - 8 comments

Watch cheese age. Cheddarvision.tv is apparently an internet phenomenon. It is the latest in a long line of spectacularly boring webcam sites, and is being hailed as the next Cambridge University coffee pot. Can't stand to wait in this Web 2.0 world? Become the cheddar's friend on myspace or watch the cheddar in timelapse [YouTube]. Be warned if you watch the video: "Highlights have included someone putting a sticker on the piece of cheese, and the sticker almost falling off," so brace yourself. What's your most boring of the web?
posted by blahblahblah at 10:40 PM PST - 23 comments

Tonic closes. At the end of a farewell performance, Marc Ribot and Rebecca Moore refused to leave the stage. They were arrested for trespassing, and hope to bring attention to New York's dwindling number of performance spaces for independent music. Previous discussions.
posted by Benjamin Nushmutt at 10:35 PM PST - 62 comments

Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman has a Signature Metal Detector. It's not about security, it's about treasure hunting, baby. Let Bill tell you all about (and sell you on) his hobby. Via the J-Walk Blog.
posted by amyms at 9:18 PM PST - 26 comments

Good grief. First, tips on how to write, now this. Yann Martel, award-winning author of Life of Pi (previously), believes the Canada Council for the Arts is not getting a fair shake from the Canadian government. The solution? Send Prime Minister Harper a book to read. Every couple of weeks, mailed on a Monday. In case you were wondering, the first book on the list is Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych (SparkNotes here). The Prime Minister’s office has not yet responded. Meanwhile, President Bush already has his own reading list.
posted by YamwotIam at 7:50 PM PST - 25 comments

Joe Heaney told lots of stories, and sang pretty well too. His style of music, Sean-Nós out of Connemara is rare indeed nowadays, but there are songs like Úna Bhán that stand on their own poetic merit, and others like Cunnla that are altogether less stodgy than one might think. If it's too Irish for you, how about meeting the language halfway?
posted by StrikeTheViol at 7:19 PM PST - 7 comments

New surgical robots are not only capable of working more precisely than human hands, but they have no metal or electrical parts, so will work under MRI machines on tumors that would otherwise be invisible. The NeuroArm will set you back $27 million, but may confer more karma than that trip to space.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 7:02 PM PST - 24 comments

Walt Handelsman's cartoons are sort of funny. I like this one.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:06 PM PST - 22 comments

Duelin' Firemen was originally conceived as a 3DO game. According to this old subgenius post (Rev. Ivan Stang was apparently part of the cast), it was slated to be completed in July of 1995. It never saw the light of day. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), some of the game's video sequences survive, edited together in all their seizure-inducing glory [YouTube]. Watch for cameos by Rudy Ray Moore, Mark Mothersbaugh, Tony Hawk, Timothy Leary, Steve Albini, David Yow, and a whole bunch of others... if you can actually bear to watch it.
posted by hypocritical ross at 6:01 PM PST - 25 comments

3D Glass Paintings by Xia Xiaowan. [Via Table of Malcontents.]
posted by homunculus at 5:46 PM PST - 24 comments

A 350 lb. runner named Jacob finished the race. He was mentioned in a previous post. A number of people felt he would be taking away resources from legitimate runners. He brought his own drinks and medical supplies and finished dead last. Not quite a Rocky story, but I'm impressed.
posted by notmtwain at 4:51 PM PST - 55 comments

The Power of the Penis [YouTube],[NSFW]. I'm sorry for making my first post ever a single link YouTube post, but this Atlanta Public Access TV clip is the most educational video I have ever seen. Alexyss Tylor hosts a show on 'Vagina Power 'and 'Penis Power' with her mother. It's about 9 minutes of true insight - women, don't let men hit the bottom or use their penis as a weapon! Separate the love, the orgasm, and the penis, OK? Make sure he buys you the shrimp plate though!
posted by waitingtoderail at 3:00 PM PST - 291 comments

Wolfville, Nova Scotia to become Canada's first fairtrade town, with an added emphasis on buying locally. Garstang, England, became the world's first fairtrade town in 2000, and Wales is aiming at being the first fairtrade country. Too big of a scale for you? You might want to start by encouraging your local schools or religious communities to make the jump.
posted by arcticwoman at 2:29 PM PST - 91 comments

"Party party party, party makes me farty, I gotta take antacid so I can keep on party!" (Direct link to legal mp3) The sublime lyrical genius of Andrew WK, as heard in the Aqua Teen movie.
posted by jbickers at 1:25 PM PST - 54 comments

If you thought Toyama Koichi's campaign speech was interesting, you may also find the 2004 House of Councilors campaign speech by Matayoshi Mitsuo, or, as he calls himself, Matayoshi Jesus, interesting.
posted by Bugbread at 1:10 PM PST - 9 comments

Abnormal Behavior Child's got some interesting things to look at and watch or play with. Site self-describes as "visual poetry". {second link's got flash/sound}
posted by dobbs at 1:08 PM PST - 6 comments

While looking for ways to digitize old home movies, I came across the Home Movie Depot Video Archives, and was in awe of how much content they have available online. The vendor provides their clients with space to upload their converted movies, and many have done so... to the tune of 80+ pages of albums. You can browse through page by page, or search for specific keywords. [more inside]
posted by avoision at 12:33 PM PST - 17 comments

Listening to words allows you to find, listen to and discuss free lectures from around the web. [via mefi projects] [mi]
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 11:08 AM PST - 11 comments

The Florida Panty Snatcher is gone, but his last request was granted. The mild-mannered truck driver wanted his long-time CB handle mentioned in his obituary. If you knew your days were numbered, what would your final wish be? What would your epitaph say?
posted by Oriole Adams at 10:33 AM PST - 106 comments

Nike Air McFly to be released?!
posted by hermitosis at 10:24 AM PST - 55 comments

This Saturday, April 21, 2007, is Astronomy Day 2007. This annual promotion of astronomy started in California (pdf) in 1973 and has since spread around the country and the world. Science museums and observatories all over are hosting special events to celebrate Astronomy Day. Find a local club near you and start enjoying the night sky!
posted by achmorrison at 9:37 AM PST - 4 comments

Would you trust this man with your life's savings? Successful entrepeneur and president of Trans Continental Airlines cum boy band svengali, Lou Pearlman was the guiding hand behind N'Sync, the Backstreet Boys, and O-Town. Now, however, he's on the lam, wanted by the FBI for swindling old folks out of $317 million. Pearlman was last seen in Berlin on February 1st; as he sat in a crowded theater watching his latest creation, the German boy band US5, win an international pop award, FBI investigators were already combing through his Florida home and offices.
posted by billysumday at 8:31 AM PST - 42 comments

Dr. Vernard Eller is no sex maniac. He is not even very sexy, although this is something you can never be sure about. He is probably just about normal, whatever that is. From the books you read about sex, being normal isn't normal these days. And being abnormal isn't as abnormal as it once was.
posted by loquacious at 2:08 AM PST - 26 comments

"I'm not from here, so when I was told that what these boys do in the fields makes 'em fast, I didn't believe it." Welcome to Muck City.
posted by kyleg at 10:58 PM PST - 15 comments

"The president's right to control his own message includes the right to exclude people expressing discordant viewpoints from the audience". (NYT, reg req). More. Lots more
posted by unSane at 8:58 PM PST - 85 comments

Internet radio is (effectively) dead.
posted by four panels at 7:26 PM PST - 125 comments

MITV: A how to for internet video production, from the friendly people at the Participatory Culture Foundation (makers of the Democracy Player).
posted by signal at 6:55 PM PST - 6 comments

"Paths are made by walking" as these artists prove by walking in the park for five days. Other projects include knitting a sweater for a giraffe, slowing down a shooting star (to allow for a lengthy wish), sprouting a seed in their hands, globes drawn by memory, and more.
posted by ewagoner at 5:41 PM PST - 27 comments

Staring at the sun. YouTube video of solar flares, made from images captured by the SOHO satellite. Yes, there is more.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:38 PM PST - 25 comments

$78 Million worth of Red Tape. An amazing (and lengthy) LA Times article that provides an extremely rare glimpse into the finances of a major motion picture, with a line item dissection of the $160 Million disaster Sahara. The items include $230,000+ for bribes to local officials, $2 Million for a 45 second plane crash sequence cut from the final film, and 3.8 Million to a total of 10 different screenwriters for a movie that eventually went on to be one of the largest (in pure dollar terms - not adjusted for inflation) financial disasters in film making history.
posted by jonson at 5:38 PM PST - 73 comments

James D. Macdonald on why you should wear your seatbelt. Not for the squeamish. I haven't been to a rollover with unrestrained passengers and driver since ... Thursday. Public safety messages. Response to James Adams paper (PDF). Besides being an EMT, Macdonald is a SF/fantasy author (with his wife Debra Doyle); he's also the author of Red Mike's Reviews. Via Brad DeLong. Previously.
posted by russilwvong at 4:46 PM PST - 80 comments

Three million long-haul truckers traverse India's 8,000-kilometer highway network for months at a time. According to studies, more than two-thirds of those men are having frequent unprotected sex, and it's a big problem. Seena Taan Ke is a campaign that's underway to create AIDS/HIV awareness among the truckers, featuring Bollywood celebrities as well as Hollywood celebrity Richard Gere. It's a good thing for a good cause. Well, up until Richard got a little frisky onstage and planted some kisses on Big Brother winner/Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. Crowds of Indians are now burning effigies of both Gere and Shetty in protest. "Such a public display is not part of Indian tradition." said the spokesman for Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata. Well, so much for AIDS awareness for truckers.
posted by miss lynnster at 4:39 PM PST - 71 comments

Clinicians regularly visited the interrogation cell to assess and treat the prisoner. Medics and a female "medical representative" checked vital signs several times per day; they assessed for dehydration and suggested enemas for constipation or intravenous fluids for dehydration. The prisoner’s hands and feet became swollen as he was restrained in a chair. These extremities were inspected and wrapped by medics and a physician. One entry describes a physician checking "for abrasions from sitting in the metal chair for long periods of time. The doctor said everything was good."...

Medical Ethics and the Interrogation of Guantanamo 063
See also US now detaining 18,000 prisoners in Iraq
posted by y2karl at 11:56 AM PST - 34 comments

L'inventaire Fantôme - an excellent and creepy animated short film (official site). Liked it? You might also enjoy the charming L'Animateur, not least for its soundtrack. Both found via StopMoShorts.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:46 AM PST - 11 comments

NewsFilter: At least 20 are dead in multiple shootings at Virginia Tech. Just last week, Virginia Tech closed part of its campus as it was the target of multiple bomb threats.
posted by phaedon at 9:38 AM PST - 1122 comments

Save Top Gear! Top Gear has become an internet phenomenon, or at least a YouTube phenomenon (previously on MeFi). The larking about of Clarkson, Hampster and Captain Slow on the BBC's most-watched show have entertained millions, despite the fact they're from a show that's supposed to be about car reviews. And there's the problem. In the next series, do the program-makers continue the escapades of the modern-day Compo, Clegg and Foggy, or do they go back to reviewing everyday cars? [Warning: This posting is YouTube-heavy].
posted by humblepigeon at 9:13 AM PST - 35 comments

Remember these? Of course you do! Well, two new videos make for interesting comparison. Not Washington D.C. but Paris France. Not the subway station but the streets. Not classical but pop. Not Joshua Bell but The Shins. Begin armchair comparative cultural criticism.....NOW!
posted by jmccw at 8:51 AM PST - 23 comments

This is Our Slaughterhouse "I never thought of making a documentary. It took a friend to convince me that not everyone grew up working in a slaughterhouse. I realized the slaughterhouse I had worked in all those years was bizarrely entertaining enough that it might make an interesting documentary..." 22-minute short film on a small-scale poultry processing plant.
posted by Miko at 8:27 AM PST - 29 comments

The Pew Research Center released its annual survey on knowledge of current political affairs among Americans. 30% of Americans can’t identify Dick Cheney as the Vice President. But, better than that, the survey discovered that Americans who consider the Daily Show and the Colbert Report to be their primary news source are the best informed. So, it turns out that the satirical news on Comedy Central is the most effective news of all.
posted by Flood at 6:57 AM PST - 42 comments

Welcome to the Bathhouse: A Straight Man's Guide NSFW: Graphic, awkward, graphically awkward
posted by bicyclefish at 4:24 AM PST - 99 comments

Design your own Chuck Taylors. Not normally a fan of corporate gimmickry. However, I grew up wearing these, and as a wee lad always dreamed of this day. (In the eighties the best that could be managed was to try to sneak a mixed pair under the nose of the sales clerk.) My Chucks were as beautiful as they were useful. And in those days they were still sweatshop-free.I knew little of the man, as the youth of tomorrow may know little of this one. I conclude with a parable.
posted by flotson at 12:44 AM PST - 67 comments

ipod valve amp ipodfilter: plug your ipod into a valve amp. Best enjoyed with a refreshing Pepsi blue!
posted by asok at 12:38 AM PST - 31 comments

Michael Jackson is in discussions about creating a 50-foot robotic replica of himself to roam the Las Vegas desert [firing laser beams!] , according to reports.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:06 AM PST - 87 comments

Dutch Submarines has mystery pictures of submarines and/or their doings with some great answers. For example, there is the story of the use of submarines as seaplane carriers yes, really.
posted by tellurian at 7:16 PM PST - 26 comments

"WANTED: Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily." The Pony Express Home Station, The Pony Express Museum and The St. Joseph Museum all have interesting histories of America's short-lived, but legendary, "fastest mail service across the west." For more extensive reading, there's the National Park Service's Pony Express: Historic Resource Study. (Second link via The Presurfer)
posted by amyms at 5:10 PM PST - 20 comments

Innocence is constructed by disavowing things that are right in front of your face. Richard Halpern, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, published a different take on Norman Rockwell's art in Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence. He looks below the idyllic surface of nostalgic Americana and sees unwitting voyeurism and blurred boundaries "between asexual friendship and Eros". Naturally, many Rockwell fans don't want to hear this about their beloved painter of innocence: an article about this book in the Boston Globe drew quite a few scathing comments. (BugMeNot logins for the Boston Globe website)
posted by Quietgal at 3:23 PM PST - 105 comments

First we had Scala. Now please allow me to introduce their antithesis... The Zimmers. Old People Rock.
posted by miss lynnster at 3:15 PM PST - 19 comments

Ubuntu is organizing a 'National Day of Truthtelling' in Durham, NC, on April 28, 2007. They argue that poor judgment does not justify rape, and are gathering women to tell their stories. Their motto: "It is better to speak."
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:30 PM PST - 112 comments

I'm a modern man, I'm a modern man, A man for the millennium, Digital and smoke free. - George Carlin hits one out of the park with the first four and a half minutes of this hour and a half Google Video. Then it's back to his stock in trade.
posted by Happy Dave at 2:09 PM PST - 89 comments

LampLamp!! Apparently the limited production run is already sold out....if both bases do connect, this thing is the most illegal/insane light bulb ever made. More.
posted by metasonix at 1:50 PM PST - 43 comments

The Other Side of the Wind is the lost last film of Orson Welles, a reputed unseen masterpiece, that may finally see the light of day in late 2008. The film tells the story of Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston), an aging movie director who has to film a low budget sex-and-symbolism flick to avoid getting overtaken by the Movie Brats of the Spielberg/Coppola generation. After providing voiceovers to two documentaries on the Persepolis ceremonies of 1971 and an intimate portrait of the Shah of Iran, Welles obtained Iranian financing to finish The Other Side of the Wind. Unfortunately, after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the bank accounts of his Iranian financier were seized, which led to the negatives for the film getting locked in a French vault. After Orson Welles died in 1985, his lover/collaborator Oja Kodar had to settle his estate with Orson's estranged (but never divorced) wife Paola Mori. There the matter might have rested, if not for an unfortunate coincidence. (More inside.)
posted by jonp72 at 9:57 AM PST - 49 comments

Patriot Search Whether you are a normal searcher, someone trying to download illegal material, a terrorist looking to build a bomb, or just hunting porn, we at Patriot Search welcome you! Our mission is to provide the best possible search engine to you while at the same time, making sure the government is informed should you search for something obscure, illegal, or unpatriotic
posted by Postroad at 9:36 AM PST - 13 comments

Soap Bubble Photos.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:24 AM PST - 20 comments

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? Electromagnetic waves from cell phones and other sources may be the cause behind the mysterious bee colony collapses in the US and Europe, a serious problem for food crops.
posted by stbalbach at 9:08 AM PST - 87 comments

On his deathbed, the former CIA spymaster E. Howard Hunt made a startling confession. Or so says his son, Saint...Maybe the Zapruder film can tell us if there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. Or was that a hoax too?
posted by nasreddin at 8:43 AM PST - 36 comments

What are you doing on May 3rd? Atheist Volunteers, in conjunction with The Rational Response Squad, want you to spend National Day of Prayer (or is the the National Day of Reason?)donating blood and signing up to be an organ donor. How are other people commemorating NDOP? Christians will be exercising their right to freedom of worship, the Presidential Prayer Team will be doing what their name implies, Bush will probably do what he did last year, and Larry Flint will be praying for the death of Bill O'Reilly.
posted by arcticwoman at 8:40 AM PST - 34 comments

FabIndia becomes a Harvard Business Case study It's a brand that does not advertise. It, in fact, celebrates the success of its copycats. And now Fabindia, the craft-conscious enterprise, is a Harvard Business School (HBS) case study. "Founded in 1960, Fabindia makes the cut for being an example of a corporation that does not just aim to do well, but does good too. "A strong mission can be both an opportunity and a constraint on the growth of a firm," points out Dr Khaire. However, the private retailer's unique value proposition has not come in the way of it being recognised as big brand today. And this in spite of the fact that Fabindia has never advertised, points out Dr Khaire."
posted by infini at 8:40 AM PST - 8 comments

Get lost in the fabulous labyrinth of Coconino World, a mammoth French site with thousands of images from illustrators, graphic artists, and cartoonists ranging from the classics to the contemporary. Some personal favorites: the generous selection of graphics from Simplicissimus, the celebrated German satire magazine published weekly from 1896-1944. James Swinerton's Canyon Kiddies. George Herriman's Krazy Kat. -more-
posted by madamjujujive at 7:30 AM PST - 9 comments

Scents from the Bible The world's first spiritual perfume, "Virtue® was conceived out of our desire to provide a perfume that would allow a person to be reminded of their Spiritual Self, by a simple whiff of it's fragrant essence." Smell the holy! (Post not inspired by previous )
posted by SansPoint at 6:05 AM PST - 35 comments

The world of perfume and fragrances: the International Perfume Museum at Grasse, France. International perfume bottles. Unusual perfumes, like Vulva [nsfw] or fun ones, like Play-Doh and cotton candy etc. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 5:00 AM PST - 38 comments

A song about bringing the soldiers home from Iraq. Defies commentary. YouTubers don't seem to get the joke. The Garance has background details.
posted by commander_cool at 11:43 PM PST - 40 comments

OMG!! Chicken cops break up bunny brawl!
posted by orthogonality at 10:01 PM PST - 52 comments

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. [pdf] via NPR
posted by bigmusic at 9:02 PM PST - 135 comments

British bookseller Waterstones asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstone’s opened its first store. These are the results.
posted by unSane at 8:55 PM PST - 53 comments

The Open Architecture Network "is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design." {via Cameron Sinclair's Ted Talk}
posted by dobbs at 8:10 PM PST - 6 comments

The war in Iran has already begun. "Iran's leadership proclaims its confidence and ambition but it draws power from a western threat that enables it to target and crush grassroots protest." Opinion and analysis from the authors of Iran on the Brink.
posted by Abiezer at 7:35 PM PST - 26 comments

There are many ways to learn about the life and times of Charles Dickens. There are numerous web pages, biographies and movies. But can any of them compare to the immersion experience of Dickens World. Don't miss the many attractions. The kids will love playing in Fagin's Den while you visit the Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge. And don't leave too early or you'll miss the evening's entertainment. "A series of 'burlesque' evening dinner shows are being especially created to provide a nightly menu of 'naughty delights' in the 'Free and Easy' Victorian Music Hall."
posted by saffry at 5:50 PM PST - 10 comments

Don Ho passes away. Legendary Hawaiian entertainer Don Ho passed away this morning. Aloha, Don.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:45 PM PST - 48 comments

Researchers are exploring the idea of scrapping the Internet and starting over with a Clean Slate. Stanford researchers say the 'Net could be a whole lot better, if it were rebuilt from the ground-up. They say that their research complements that of the National Science Foundation's Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) effort to build a better network research platform, as well as the Future Internet Network Design (FIND) program for developing new Internet architectures.
posted by ericb at 5:02 PM PST - 67 comments

Fruit Crate Label Art from the 1910s Thru 1950s (via)
posted by Kwantsar at 3:01 PM PST - 34 comments

The Baked Bean Museum of Excellence was created by a Welshman who has legally changed his name to Captain Beany from Planet Beanus. That I know of, he is not a Mefite. He does, however, look like Bono after eating too many carrots. Just sayin'.
posted by miss lynnster at 1:46 PM PST - 27 comments

A surprisingly beautiful video of a squid giving birth. The editing is a little over done, and the adult squid doesn't actually show up until 2:50.
posted by delmoi at 11:15 AM PST - 24 comments

Glenn Fischer : Creates beautiful mixed media works contrasting the rectangular form of the canvas with ovals of various elements. [via]
posted by grapefruitmoon at 10:43 AM PST - 3 comments

Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, and Pearl star in The Landlord.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 10:19 AM PST - 46 comments

Welcome to Larry Brash's Microsoft and Bill Gates Joke Page.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:14 AM PST - 23 comments

Remember this? While randomly reading some assorted Digg posts, I saw someone mention the old Toshiba Liberato laptop. On doing a GIS search, up came a link to the "Apple Doomsday Clock". It just floors me that this anonymous anti-Apple blog (which even predates the word "blog"), is still online. It dates from the period when Jobs retook the CEO chair, and started turning the failing company around--the last posting was in June, 1999. Perhaps it should be treated as a historical site, and preserved for the future amusement of Mac users?
posted by metasonix at 10:06 AM PST - 28 comments

On Sunday, April 1, ThinkGeek.com jokingly introduced the 8-bit Tie, and due to customer demand, claims that now it'll be a real product. On Friday, April 13, apparently due to customer demand, hard drive manufacturer WiebeTech has now introduced the MouseJiggler, and claims it's not a joke.
posted by Fofer at 10:00 AM PST - 28 comments

Scientists say they have successfully made immature sperm cells from human bone marrow samples.
posted by jason's_planet at 8:55 AM PST - 41 comments

Wim Delvoye makes art out of skin, filming it in extreme close-up, or, at his Art Farm in China, by tattooing pigs which are later stuffed or skinned. More images: 1, 2, 3, 4.
posted by jack_mo at 7:15 AM PST - 24 comments

Don Lancaster: energy and small business Lancaster wrote in 'Nuts and Volts', wrote 'The Incredible Secret Money Machine', and has a website that ranges from small business to hydrogen economy to ebay to magic sinewaves. This is the link to his current blog, but take a look at his archived works. His writings on avoiding filing for patents are particularly thought-provoking and perhaps inspirational.
posted by dragonsi55 at 6:15 AM PST - 7 comments

Live, From Outer Space: rural fires [1, 2], The Haze in China [1 ,2, 3] and its movement, aerosols, and the brothers carbon monoxide [a photochemical smog agent] and carbon dioxide.
posted by trinarian at 2:59 AM PST - 10 comments

Oskar, Ernest and Anatole are Les Music-Robots, a four ton punchcard controlled trio currently playing at the Berlin Museum for Communication. [More inside]
posted by zamboni at 2:29 AM PST - 5 comments

Scala & Kolacny Brothers is a Belgium girls choir ("2 brothers and 40 girls") that covers bands such as The Cure, Radiohead, and U2. Their songs range from hauntingly beautiful ("With or Without You" youtube/streaming/download (26.1MB)) to strange (42MB podcast mp3--"Teenage Dirtbag" cover starts at 17:00)to downright disturbing ("I Touch Myself"). Want more? Smells like Teen Spirit, Friday I'm in Love, Someone New, Dream On, Can't Get You Out of My Head. (See Wiki, myspace.)
posted by null terminated at 9:33 PM PST - 71 comments

Animated Pixelated Cities: Gaze at the extreme pixelated detail of the neighborhoods of Pixeldam (including a pixel Starbucks with tiny coffees and a pixel strip club) or the science fiction themed PixelMoon, collectively generated by over a hundred contributors. There is also the slightly less impressive PixelPlaza and the oddness of IsoCity and Sumea, as well as the impressive work of eboy [prev]. Ready to try yourself, but don't have the pixel skills? City Creator has you covered.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:14 PM PST - 14 comments

The Kansas City Sheet Music Collection is an enormous catalog of zoomable, high-rez scans of old sheet music. See how the popular music of years past was marketed with Black and Native American imagery as well as exotica. There are lovely and fanciful calligraphic designs, songs of World War 1 and, uh, vegetables. There's even a little ditty by Mark Twain. Plus some undeniable truths and the age-old question.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:47 PM PST - 8 comments

Wow. I don't know much about dressage, but this video is just astonishing.
posted by cerebus19 at 7:21 PM PST - 150 comments

This Sunday will be Yom HaShoah "Holocaust Martyrs' Remembrance Day" in Israel. A month ago Eric Muller, a law professor at UNC, went to Germany to find what he could about his great uncle Leopold Müller. Today he got something unexpected in the mail. (via)
posted by sotonohito at 6:52 PM PST - 15 comments

Croc Bites Off Hand
posted by Stynxno at 6:10 PM PST - 65 comments

Ghost In The Machine "I have a murderer's music on my iPod and, almost reflexively, I couldn't help but think of him while listening to these songs—they were his songs, songs he gave me. [...] Listening to his music put me inside [his] head. [...] I wanted to throw up." [more inside]
posted by rossination at 5:36 PM PST - 41 comments

Lee Iacocca has a few thoughts on President Bush.
posted by EarBucket at 5:25 PM PST - 54 comments

Mathematica Policy Research Inc. released the findings of their study on government funded abstinence programs. The results? Not so great for the abstinence programs, or the federal & state governments which combined spend $80+ million funding the programs. The major findings were that the abstinence programs they studied had no correlation with a decreased level of sexual activity in the population of teens they surveyed. Interestingly, one of the programs they studied was a voluntary after school program consisting of daily 2.5 hour sessions with enrollment beginning at grade 3 and continuing into the 8th grade, and even that program didn't produce a significantly higher number of abstinent teens. The study was ordered by Congress. You can read the full study here (pdf, 164 pages.)
posted by nerdcore at 2:45 PM PST - 60 comments

Sure, you can make your IRA contribution just before the deadline this year in plain old mutual funds, but did you know it is possible to put retirement money into Costa Rican hardwoods? Or income properties or perhaps even Chinese currency (not much yield there)? You can set up a self-directed IRA, where you choose the investments, which opens up quite a range of possibilities and perils. The dangers are obvious, and be sure watch the fees, though, and, of course, consult with your legal, tax, and financial advisors first.
posted by Adamchik at 1:33 PM PST - 7 comments

You want trivia? I got your trivia right here. Previously.
posted by hifiparasol at 1:08 PM PST - 22 comments

Cooking with Vincent Price! Delicious mushrooms & stuffed eggs! Roast pork sirloin with prunes, onions & red wine! Small boys in a spectacular curry! Cooking not your thing? Well, would you prefer learning about cricket? Or perhaps Florentine art? Voilà, my friends!
posted by miss lynnster at 1:07 PM PST - 35 comments

Over the next four weeks, Jeffrey Sachs will be giving the 2007 BBC Reith Lectures. Download [MP3] the first week's lecture ("Bursting at the Seams"), or subscribe [XML] to the podcast. Listen to the 1999-2006 lectures in full, or hear historic lecturers such as Bertrand Russell and J.K. Galbraith.
posted by Aloysius Bear at 11:51 AM PST - 14 comments

The World's Greatest Knock-offs! While the world waits for the dinky Smart FourFour to be released in the US, the Chinese have already made a knock-off - for $5,300! More great knock-off cars.
posted by parmanparman at 10:57 AM PST - 45 comments

"Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian", gasped the first soldier.
"Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!" returned Grignr.
I cannot believe that I once considered my life complete having never been exposed to SciFi convention mainstay and possibly Worst Science Fiction Story Ever Written, The Eye of Argon. Previously mentioned on Metafilter in comments, it is time for Jim Theis' magnum opus have its day in the Blue. If you can make it through the story without laughing (most can't), there's always the MST3K'd version to attempt as well! (via)
posted by robocop is bleeding at 10:25 AM PST - 91 comments

Download munkey points out rougelike magazine and AliensRL, nice a roguelike shooter based on the Aliens movies.
posted by boo_radley at 10:17 AM PST - 20 comments

The most sadistic user-created Super Mario Bros level ever. I cried with laughter.
posted by humblepigeon at 10:13 AM PST - 68 comments

Friday Flash Fun: Dot Action II. The first 30 or so levels are pretty easy, but it does get harder.
posted by seanyboy at 9:46 AM PST - 14 comments

There and Back Again: The Soul of the Commuter How long is your commute? Is it worth the personal and social cost? Nick Paumgarten in this week's New Yorker on the bargains Americans strike between their work lives and home lives.
posted by Miko at 9:45 AM PST - 83 comments

It's almost better than bubble-wrap. Just touch your expanding dot to make contact with other dots. Clear an entire screen and you'll see Boomshine. Friday flash fun was never so gentle.
posted by squidfartz at 9:26 AM PST - 66 comments

Put down that McChicken sandwich, punk, and back away slowly. OK, now run! The chicken is T. Rex's closest known living relative.
posted by jfuller at 9:02 AM PST - 29 comments

114 seconds.
posted by phaedon at 8:56 AM PST - 30 comments

You'll go by the phone kiosk and you'll hear young men having these very strange, almost surreal arguments or discussions with their wives over something like, "Hey the garage is leaking, how do we fix that?" And what she maybe doesn't understand is, maybe that guy just got ambushed, like half an hour ago, and he's shaking from the adrenaline, and he's just calling her just to hear a familiar voice, and she's like, "We gotta get the sprinklers fixed." And he's like, "Oh, OK ... . I love you." He just wants to get back to the ground. And that's what makes me angry, is what all of this is doing to these very young families. It just makes me mad. It makes anybody mad.

—Henry Rollins, interviewed in TNR (reg required, free) on his frequent USO visits to Afghanistan and Iraq.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:38 AM PST - 59 comments

Destroy the world, one sneeze at a time. Friday flash fun.
posted by Malor at 7:46 AM PST - 27 comments

Say you live in a forest and have limited resources. You need to make signposts to point out trails, water sources, meeting places and the like, but your readers might speak a variety of languages. Also, you want the signposts to last a really long time. What do you do? Create trail trees! Now say you live in the 21st century. What do you do? Create a database! And blog about it!
posted by DU at 7:46 AM PST - 20 comments

Who wrote the song Hey Joe? Jimi Hendrix recorded the most famous version, but Hey Joe has been recorded by a bunch of artists including Love, The Leaves, The Byrds, The Music Machine, and Eddie Murphy(??!). The author of the song themed with infidelity, murder, and ultimately running from the law, is under dispute, which is well documented on Wikipedia. An mp3 blog called Used Bin Forever features a post about this subject including a mp3 of a mindblowing version by the 60's Japanese band, The Golden Cups.
posted by byronimation at 6:53 AM PST - 27 comments

Mother fucking bird flu! Asher Sarlin just made me laugh so hard, I think a little bit of poop came out. Be sure to check out Social Studies Fighter II Turbo, nobody needs a venti and what the world would look like if orange juice didn't taste terrible right after you brushed your teeth.
posted by jbickers at 6:48 AM PST - 55 comments

Today seems like a splendid day to talk about superstitions. Not that long ago, there was an Anti-Superstition Society, whose thirteen members once presented a gift to the occupant of the thirteenthth capsule in space. Now defunct, others have taken on the challenge of debunking superstitions. Can't make the next anti-superstition party? Have your own superstition bash.
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 6:00 AM PST - 8 comments

Billy Collins: action poet. Animated quicktime video poem readings.
posted by srboisvert at 5:47 AM PST - 19 comments

Defender of the Crown can be played on the website of the game's original designers. You are a noble who must unite England by jousting, warring and rescuing pretty maidens. The king has been murdered, the crown has been stolen and as your bestest pal Robin Hood says, "only you can save England."
posted by Kattullus at 5:07 AM PST - 37 comments

Alan Johnston ,the only western journalist (BBC) in Gaza is still missing. Despite calls from various quarters , local protests , a first ever meeting between the UK gov and Hamas, and unprecedentated 'global media' co-operation. He seems as far from his family as ever.
posted by burr1545 at 4:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Paul Wolfowitz faces calls to resign after admitting he helped his SO win a promotion to a high-paying job at the World Bank. The executive board of the World Bank has said it did not approve a hefty pay rise ordered by its president Paul Wolfowitz for his partner, Shaha Riza. This comes after a 2006 pledge to target corruption and stating that staff members should be praised when they raised concerns about corruption in projects. Seems as though this new tactic is starting to work. For those with short memories, prior to being picked by the President head up the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz studied under neo-con grandfather Leo Strauss while a grad student at the University of Chicago, was a founding member of the PNAC, and an architect of the Bush Doctrine, and by extension, the Iraq War.
posted by psmealey at 3:51 AM PST - 84 comments

Roscoe Lee Browne, class act from beginning to end. The first time I ever noticed him was in The Cowboys, a western I've watched many times just to hear him speak.
posted by loosemouth at 3:34 AM PST - 18 comments

Akira2019: a fan-site devoted to the classic Japanese manga and anime, offering up production cels, background info on the ground-breaking digital coloring technique used in the Epic translation, images, and film music.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:49 AM PST - 26 comments

I hereby declare myself king of Monkey Kick-Off. With a score of 4750 Monkey Meters, I feel secure & confident that my reign will be a long & prosperous one.
posted by jonson at 1:40 AM PST - 49 comments

"If you had Bruce playing with you," Dylan wrote, in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles, "that's all you would need to do just about anything."

Bruce Langhorne has quite the discography. And a hot sauce, to boot. And he's led quite the life. Here is Richie Unterberger's interview with Langhorne in Parts One and Two. And here he talks with Unterberger about working with Mimi and Richard Fariña.

On a personal note, I will add that his hot sauce is hot indeed. Will buy it again.
posted by y2karl at 12:31 AM PST - 6 comments

Nice Ass! Jon Katz describes why he owns and loves his donkeys. Follow-up: what happened when Lulu fell during an ice storm.
posted by homunculus at 12:13 AM PST - 20 comments

TV in Japan. A hyper representation of what airs, or has aired on Japanese TV. Ranging from action packed to truly awesome (and from monkeys to ninjas), set your eyes to "dazzled" and brain to "frazzled".
posted by myopicman at 12:12 AM PST - 7 comments

The Online Paper Airplane Museum. Hundreds and hundreds of designs. Also check out The Paperang, which bills itself as "The Best Paper Airplane System In The World."
posted by amyms at 11:11 PM PST - 10 comments

78Man is a member of YouTube, who has created a collection of 378 videos of 78rpm records playing on the phonograph or gramophone. It's an amazing mix of blues, ragtime, jazz, old quirky songs of all kinds and more. Choices include: I'm tired of fattenin' frogs for snakes. She's lazy,She's lousy and she loves it. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 9:31 PM PST - 34 comments

Google maps the Darfur crisis To Find Darfur on Google Earth 1. Download Google Earth 2. Open the program; in bottom-left corner, click open tabs 'PrimaryDatabase,' then 'Global Awareness,' then 'USHMM: Crisis in Darfur.' Check the box next to 'Darfur' so markers appear over the region.Double-click the word 'Darfur' to automatically zoom in on the region. 3. Use mouse or navigation tools in top-right corner to move around the map.
posted by jne1813 at 7:47 PM PST - 7 comments

Bioluminescence singalong and other almost-Friday-Flash-goodness from OLogy, the American Museum of Natural History's site for kids and kids at heart. Make a DNA bracelet, investigate the Inca, and lots more.
posted by greatgefilte at 7:12 PM PST - 1 comment

The Bayeux Tapestry, animated (YouTube). Or, if you prefer, the tapestry served as old school, Web 1.0 embedded images, scene-by-scene with explanatory text (official site), and as a QuickTime VR panorama. (Previously, the Historic Tale Construction Kit.)
posted by steef at 5:57 PM PST - 12 comments

In September 2006 the largest known prime number, a 9.8 million digit number, was discovered. If you find one over ten million digits you can win US$100,000 (of which you get to keep $50,000). No maths is required - just download the software and you're away. Warning: it takes about a month to run one primality check so some patience is required. Look out though Cooper and Boone look like they might beat you to it.
posted by meech at 5:57 PM PST - 32 comments

adultsheepfinder.com
posted by thirteenkiller at 5:44 PM PST - 48 comments

They use complicated words here. I will look those up in the dictionary later on... A New Zealand filmmaker responds to the fakeness of the Poor Pluto episode in the lonelygirl15 saga by filming a ten-year-old girl let loose with a microphone in the Govett-Brewster art gallery. Her spontaneous reactions to the Wind Wand and other kinetic sculptures by Len Lye ("sounds like my old Barbie car") and Tony Nicholls ("It's connected to those little hinge-y thingies") manage to take the piss out of both modern art and the lonelygirl15 phenomenon simultaneously.
posted by jonp72 at 5:18 PM PST - 23 comments

Projection Bombing, via Code & Form. Outdoor digital projection in urban environments is a method for getting your content up big before the eyes and in the minds of your fellow city inhabitants.
posted by signal at 4:37 PM PST - 11 comments

Gay by Design? : What does your car say about your sexual orientation? Do you drive a lesbaru? Or how about one of the Top Ten Gay Cars of 2007? Are you having a hard time being able to tell if your car is gay or not? Just drive right on over to gaywheels to find out more about cars and the "pink dollar."
posted by grapefruitmoon at 2:23 PM PST - 79 comments

How to build your very own balsawood crow, the poetry of Dennis Beerpint, Little Severin the Mystic Badger, plus lobster diagrams and of course the Binnacle of the Week await you at Hooting Yard. Celebrated in song and story, Hooting Yard (also a radio show and podcast) is the home of Frank Key, author of such works as Sydney the Bat is Awarded the Order of Lenin and A Complete and Utter History of Norwich.
posted by gamera at 1:29 PM PST - 10 comments

Writers' Rooms The Guardian takes you inside the spaces where writers such as JG Ballard and Will Self attempt to cajole words into doing their bidding.
posted by drezdn at 1:25 PM PST - 22 comments

"Hello America!" - a message of greeting from the UK by Pat Condell including some nasty truthiness from good old Europe. [MySpace Video]
posted by homodigitalis at 1:15 PM PST - 21 comments

You have spacial skills. Apply them in Building Houses 2, on mathsnet.net. Or freestyle in Building Houses 1. Or at night! Oh and also there's like a hundred more puzzles over there too. Some java required.
posted by cortex at 11:51 AM PST - 66 comments

Feeling nostalgic for those old school Soviet shindigs? Westerners are welcome to North Korea's Arirang Mass Games. Tickets are on sale now. Will tourist dollars/euros be the undoing of North Korea?
posted by oneirodynia at 9:56 AM PST - 21 comments

People find printing Web pages too hard. Hewlett-Packard is devising ways to get people to print Web pages instead of reading them on-screen. Last month, H.P. bought Tabblo (previously), whose software creates templates that reorganize the photos and text blocks on a Web page to fit standard sizes of paper. H.P. wants to make the software a standard by making it ubiquitous like flash, java and Acrobat.
posted by pithy comment at 8:16 AM PST - 67 comments

"Like the famous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes ... This sounds like the Administration's version of 'the dog ate my homework" says Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, as the White House struggles to explain how dozens of staffers' emails sought by the Senate Judiciary Committee in the course of its investigation were 'accidentally' deleted. "You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."
posted by sweet mister at 8:14 AM PST - 241 comments

A Nashville-area blogger wrote about her experience at an employment agency called JL Kirk & Associates, formerly Bernard Haldane. An associate at the employment agency responded to the blog post. The blogger reposted the employment agent's comment as its own post, also including a rebuttal. Yesterday the blogger received a certified letter from an attorney representing the agency (text of letter) stating that the blogger must remove the posts by 4/13 or risk a lawsuit for "tortuous interference" (sic). They also threatened to "contact (her) Internet Service Provider, Comcast, to have (her) internet access shut down." The story of JL Kirk & Associates and their threats of a lawsuit against a blogger has now been picked up by Fark and Instapundit. This is undoubtedly not the outcome JL Kirk & Associates was hoping for.
posted by brittney at 7:42 AM PST - 44 comments

In the grand scheme of things, eating locally grown food may be more important than eating organically grown foods. To help you reach that goal, there's 100-Mile Diet, a blog that deals with the benefits and pitfalls of trying to eat only foods grown locally; The Eating Well Guide, which will help you find markets, restaurants, etc. that go along with the sustainable foodthink; and Local Harvest, which will help you find local and organically grown food sources. (PS. Now's probably the time to start signing up for your favorite CSA!)
posted by Dave Faris at 7:37 AM PST - 53 comments

More fodder for your mp3 player - audio books of Hesse, Kafka, Nietzsche, Plato, Tennyson, and quite a bit more from ThoughtAudio.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:36 AM PST - 15 comments

Web Sites Accessible for Everyone is a fairly comprehensive site, offering a variety of resources for anyone interested in website accessibility. I've found the AJAX and Accessibility section particularly interesting. Thank you University of Washington.
posted by sciurus at 5:27 AM PST - 5 comments

"I do not have a single constructive proposal. Annihilate everything that exists.(YouTube)." Toyama Koichi announces his run for Governor of Tokyo. Something is perhaps lost (or gained) in translation. That feeling in your chest is the inner demon smiling.
posted by kid ichorous at 12:46 AM PST - 56 comments

Fourteen Places to Eat - photos from rural America
posted by Bighappyfunhouse at 10:22 PM PST - 17 comments

Should you buy a house, or rent? (caution, flash & NYT) The answer is, of course, it depends. One of the biggest factors is how well the housing market will do after you buy. [previously: 1, 2] [via]
posted by rubin at 9:21 PM PST - 104 comments

The world's second largest forest and one of the oldest on Earth, was traded for bars of soap and bottles of beer: Logging companies negotiate with local chiefs, walk away rich
posted by growabrain at 9:20 PM PST - 27 comments

(news/outragefilter): BBC reports that the new appraisal forms for Indian civil service employees require women to disclose information about their menstrual histories and any pregnancy leave.
posted by aberrant at 8:18 PM PST - 25 comments

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 "His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago. Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States." .
posted by landedjentry at 8:10 PM PST - 611 comments

MC5 documentary, "A True Tesimonial," one step closer to being released? MC5 (wiki) guitarist Wayne Kramer and his wife sued Chicago-based filmmakers, David Thomas and Laurel Legler, charging that the never-released A True Testimonial, in which Kramer appears prominently, used MC5 songs without permission. A court ruling by U.S. District Judge Andrew J. Guilford last week favoring A True Testimonial filmmakers, might give fans hope. Yee-haw and kick out the jams!
posted by NoMich at 6:41 PM PST - 18 comments

Chaffee, White, Grissom & Freeman are the names of four artificial islands immediately off the Southern California port of Long Beach. From the shore, they each look like an inhabited island paradise, complete with waterfalls, interesting buildings, many palm trees and crazy nighttime party lighting. In fact, they are offshore oil wells, built on 10 acre Dubai-esque man-made islands created for the purpose of housing the oil wells, and disguised so as to comply with local aesthetic standards.
posted by jonson at 6:41 PM PST - 24 comments

Mary Uduru of Nigeria. Although we see lots of single-image representations of African poverty (usually in the form of a swollen-bellied child on the brink of starvation) it's rare to find a photo-essay like this one one, which brings us an intimate, informative and non-sensationalist view of the life of the working poor there.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:25 PM PST - 18 comments

Iranian envoy wounds 'confirmed': The head of the International Red Cross in Tehran, Peter Stoeker, says he saw wounds on an Iranian diplomat who has alleged that US forces in Iraq tortured him. There were marks on Jalal Sharafi's feet, legs, back and nose. [photos].
On 4 February soldiers from the Iraqi army 36th Commando battalion in Baghdad, considered to be under American control, had seized Jalal Sharafi, while he was carrying a videogame, a gift for his daughter. Read more about the US secret operations against Iranians in Iraq in an exclusive report by The Independent.
posted by hoder at 4:22 PM PST - 48 comments

Click trough Household Magazine, from 1951 Brought to you from the world of The Swank Pad
posted by edgeways at 4:16 PM PST - 15 comments

Two years ago, a mistake was made: The tattoo read "Chi-Tonw" instead of "Chi-Town." Now, in an act of solidarity, more people are getting tattos spelled Chi-Tonw on purpose. This fellow had it spelled that way on his neck. Chicago Tribune news and blog coverage, and audio on NPR.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:16 PM PST - 46 comments

America's forgotten war. Are we winning?
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot at 3:23 PM PST - 37 comments

Hybrid: the roleplaying game. A Timecube style "role playing game." via Grand Text Auto
posted by juv3nal at 1:58 PM PST - 51 comments

Wordsworth... for the YouTube generation is a rapped version of ' Wandered Lonely As A Cloud' The squirrel is the stuff of nightmares
posted by darsh at 1:31 PM PST - 12 comments

An Introduction to Anti-Civilization Anarchist Thought And Practice What Is Primitivism? . . . Biocentrism vs. Anthropocentrism . . . A Critique of Symbolic Culture . . . The Domestication of Life . . . The Rejection of Science . . . Against Mass Society . . . Beyond Leftism . . . Rewilding and Reconnection
posted by jason's_planet at 12:06 PM PST - 216 comments

Newsfilter: The State Attorney General of North Carolina, who took over the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case and conducted his own investigation after Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong withdrew from the case when the North Carolina State bar filed ethics charges against him, has dismissed the remaining charges against the three players originally accused of first degree forcible rape, first degree sexual offense, and kidnapping. [previously discussed].
posted by ericb at 11:46 AM PST - 155 comments

The first rule of Milk Club is you don't talk about Milk Club. Some nameless neighbors of mine, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, are really in to raw milk. So much so that they risk transporting the stuff across state lines...in violation of federal law.
posted by digiFramph at 11:44 AM PST - 51 comments

Gary Stasiuk's beautiful Digital Creatures pulls the curtains on the kinematics of geometric objects, after which he plays with the mathematics and user interactivity of generative art and shows how to build the appearance of AI behaviors into Flash objects.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:16 AM PST - 14 comments

"It wasn't scary, it was just gratuitous, as if they thought, 'I know, let's have a rape,' and that made me quite angry." The question will be asked often in the coming weeks, as "Vacancy" and "Hostel 2" approach: Do modern horror films ("gorno," or gore pornography) go too far, particularly when it comes to women? Who said violent misogyny was entertaining? Is this just a retread of the exploitation wave of the 1970s/80s? (Most links NSFW, sensitive souls, people who detest violence)
posted by jbickers at 9:09 AM PST - 198 comments

Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig provides a fascinating glimpse of the people and places of 5 of the "-stan" countries of Central Asia. You can see more work and current projects on his flickr page. Noteworthy photo essays: Arsan Baths in Almatry, Soviet Roadside Bus Stops (seen here before), and his recent The Wheelbarrow Operators of Monrovia.
posted by madamjujujive at 8:32 AM PST - 14 comments

"While the West debates whether the Islamic world is ready for democracy, an equally appropriate question is whether the West is ready for Islamic democracy." Parties of God, by Ken Silverstein, is an interesting read on democracy in the Middle East.
posted by chunking express at 7:43 AM PST - 50 comments

"I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their brain (innermost thoughts)..." From the 14th to 16th Century, The Border Reivers turned the border regions between England and Scotland into "a permanent battleground" or lawless area much like the American Wild West. Learn more about these strange groups or cheer for the Rugby team.
posted by drezdn at 7:39 AM PST - 16 comments

Photos and videos of the 2007 Big Wheel race down Lombard Street, the "crookedest street in America." (Or is it?) Official BYOBW page [warning: very loud music on pageload] (via)
posted by desjardins at 7:04 AM PST - 18 comments

The main problem with panorama photography is that good photo stitching software is expensive and often difficult to use. Then when you have finally managed to put together a good panorama, it's nigh-on impossible to share it with your friends. Scrolling back and forth on your screen is possible, of course, that's so un-Web 2.0!

CleVR offers a possible solution with a free, embeddable Flash viewer for panorama photographs, with some cool outdoors, groovy indoors and some downright surreal stuff already available.
posted by SharQ at 6:47 AM PST - 36 comments

Thought Chuck Norris was over and done with as far as internet memes go? Guess again, as Chris Sims presents an ad for Chuck Norris Action Jeans, "pants designed specifically to be worn while you are kicking people in the face." They'd set you back less than $20. If there's no such thing as Too Much Chuck in your life, then you may want to read Sims's review of Justice Riders.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 6:43 AM PST - 21 comments

Victim of the Brain A 'docudrama' about Godel, Escher and Bach author, Douglas Hofstadter, and philosopher Dan Dennett produced in 1988. I'm not sure how to describe it, other than incredibly strange and fascinating.
posted by empath at 5:44 AM PST - 19 comments

Kirigami is an ingenius way of cutting and folding paper, creating designs in many styles, often with a captivating simplicity. Some are like geometric lace, some are marvelous 3-D modular, while some are amazing architectural creations.
posted by nickyskye at 4:13 AM PST - 21 comments

Lightsaber Combat. Far more than you ever wanted to know. Part of the magic that is the Star Wars Portal on wikipedia.
posted by srboisvert at 1:45 AM PST - 48 comments

Shiftspace creates a collaborative layer over any website. (Tools like this have been tried before, but this is the first one with an overt Wikipedia-style public service philosophy.)
posted by Tlogmer at 1:38 AM PST - 12 comments

When the usual fanfiction fare just doesn't cut it ... there's shipping and then there's slash, with coined terms such as squick and mpreg. The usual suspects are Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Phantom of the Opera - and then there's Kirk/Spock, Hermione/Ginny, Cloud/Sephiroth, and lots more. And it's not limited to recent works - there's also some Jesus/Judas Biblical action going on. (Mostly text, with the occasional NSFW jpg.)
posted by Xere at 12:50 AM PST - 50 comments

Ladies and Gentlemen The Fabulous Stains!
posted by serazin at 10:41 PM PST - 17 comments

"...it looks like the dad's selling the tickets, the boy's complaining about something, and the mom and girl are extremely disinterested." If you liked Ted Bates, you'll love the Portland Sea Dogs. Quoth King Kaufman: "The hilarious part of the controversy is the statue itself, which is funnier than Spinal Tap's Stonehenge. It's that bad."
posted by staggernation at 9:13 PM PST - 54 comments

An amazing collection of classic American television commercials. Sorted by category: Eat, Drink, Smoke, Clean, Groom, Shop and Travel. Includes descriptions and historical background. The commercials can be viewed in either RealPlayer or MediaPlayer format, and newer ones will work in both IE and Firefox.
posted by amyms at 9:01 PM PST - 7 comments

Stem Cell Research: An interesting argument on why Bush's policy on stem cell research doesn't make sense.
posted by Mave_80 at 7:07 PM PST - 43 comments

How to write a spelling corrector in twenty lines of Python.
posted by alms at 6:45 PM PST - 44 comments

The Spirit Of Truth.
posted by hama7 at 5:19 PM PST - 22 comments

The recent post about Joshua Bell was merely the tip of the Unannounced Performance iceberg, a phenomenon I've often marveled at. The Beatles famously did it in 1969 on a roof. Mos Def got arrested for it last year. REM reformed in 2005 at a wedding, something the Police did at Sting's 1992 nuptials. Sometime after midnight in Union Square NYC on Nov. 5, 2005, Arcade Fire blew a few lucky fans' minds. Bruce Springsteen jammed with a street musician in 1988. In 2000, Weezer took to the stage under the name Goat Punishment and U2 used to sneak onstage disguised as The Dalton Brothers. In 2005 it was rumored they'd played a Beatlesque rooftop gig in NYC, but you can't believe everything you hear. I could go on all night with tales of secret gigs and surprise busking sessions, but I'm sure you've got plenty of rare musical moments to share in the comments.
posted by ktoad at 5:14 PM PST - 56 comments

Noah Baumbach, Writer and Director of The Squid and the Whale, has a short film on youtube. 1--2--3
posted by jne1813 at 4:53 PM PST - 19 comments

NYPD Intelligence Op Targets Dot-Matrix Graffiti Bike. More details on the premeditated arrest of Joshua Kinberg by the NYPD just before the 2004 Republican National Convention. Kinberg, now the CEO of FireAnt, was targeted by the "R.N.C. Intelligence Squad" for his Bikes Against Bush project. The police lost his Xtracycle. [Via BB.]
posted by homunculus at 4:39 PM PST - 64 comments

The house of Johnny Cash is no more. Earlier today a fire was sparked amid fumes of a wood preservative and the structure was destroyed. New owner/restorer Barry Gibb unsure how to be Mr. Natural now that the Nature House is gone. Warning: Horribly written Tennessean piece.
posted by rhythim at 4:25 PM PST - 19 comments

Meet Franklin, the Fair-Housing Fox. Says HUD: "Just as McGruff the Crime Dog represents the fight against crime, Franklin, the Fair Housing Fox, will symbolize the nation's efforts to end housing discrimination." And also, apparently, really, really bad web-page design.
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:57 PM PST - 58 comments

Open Sourceware Consortium "While MIT has pioneered the open courseware movement where many class materials are made freely available online, there's now an Open Courseware Consortium extending courses to dozens of universities and many thousands of courses." - Don Lancaster
posted by dragonsi55 at 1:34 PM PST - 9 comments

No-fly list? Sure, we remember that. It's caused some inconvenience. Some people you wouldn't think of as terrorists are on it. Then again, some known terrorists are on that list. But that's old hat; now the government has a new terrorist list. it's almost all foreigners, but if your name or part of your name is on it, you might have problems.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:10 PM PST - 43 comments

It's not you, it's your apartment. Is your awful decor interfering with your love life? Maybe this lighting tutorial can help.
posted by hydrophonic at 12:45 PM PST - 36 comments

Cloned Disney cels: page 1 [Russian, bad English], page 2 [Russian, bad English]
posted by thirteenkiller at 12:38 PM PST - 25 comments

“[O]ur military today oversees spending of about a billion and a quarter dollars every day. Most of that is misspent. Over this past quarter-century, we've reinforced an old industrial-policy military with hardware that makes increasingly less sense, spending most on things that provide the least return. The principal argument for that is: ‘We have to keep the big, old-style military because we might fight a big, old-style war one day.’ But in the future the bigger you are, the harder you're going to fall to ever-more accurate weapons.”
posted by jason's_planet at 11:52 AM PST - 52 comments

RateMyTurban.com I noticed most Sikhs living outside India have a pretty boring turban life... I wanted to showcase turbans as an art form and try to revive the majestic roots of turbans. -Ash Singh, Founder and Producer. What is a turban? How to tie a turban. [via]
posted by bobobox at 10:35 AM PST - 39 comments

6400 Post It Notes + 10 people x 5 hours = Tribute to Donkey Kong!
posted by Dr-Baa at 8:48 AM PST - 30 comments

The humble Street Vendor. The Pushcarts of India. Street Vendors from around the world. And some more pictures of Street Vendors.
posted by hadjiboy at 8:40 AM PST - 16 comments

Yahoo! Australia introduces a new search engine that uses OpenSearch and pretty little AJAX tricks to integrate results from Flickr, Wikpedia, YouTube (and so on). You can customize the layout, and even add your own search sources. It’s called Alpha, it’s currently in Beta, and aims to get through the rest of the Greek alphabet by June. (Via podlob.)
posted by Milkman Dan at 8:39 AM PST - 13 comments

Ezra Pound: The Complete Poetry Recordings at PennSound
posted by ubueditor at 8:30 AM PST - 31 comments

Famousr is a sort of celebrity hot or not.
posted by cgc373 at 8:14 AM PST - 57 comments

Our shameless culture, by David Cox (The Guardian): Iran has shown the British what kind of people we really are: without honour and without shame. The Sun, the now officially approved disseminator of British military information, notes that navigator Arthur Batchelor was "tormented" by being called "Mr Bean". Understandably, he had to cry himself to sleep. Perhaps President Ahmadinejad feared that the goody bags might just prove a step too far. But no, they were gratefully received, in a response that aptly captures the infantilisation of a people that once ruled much of the world. Navigator Batchelor has however since complained that the quality of his own bag's contents was not what he had hoped.
posted by hoder at 7:55 AM PST - 94 comments

Sunspot activity is closely linked to climate. Although it observes an 11 and 22 year cycle, the overall trend of activity shows much longer term variations. The so-called Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) coincided with the Little Ice Age, while the Medieval Maximum coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. Analysis of beryllium isotopes from ice cores in Greenland shows that sunspot activity is currently at a 1000 year high. Could this account, at least in part, for global warming? Recent data from Mars suggests this may be so, while others remain sceptical. Bonus pix, more here.
posted by unSane at 7:38 AM PST - 60 comments

Are you tired of being against him? Are you tired of expecting him to fail, and standing up to boo when he does so? Are you tired of not feeling good about having Alex Rodriguez play third base for your favorite team? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you are ready. Welcome to The Movement.
posted by one_bean at 7:02 AM PST - 52 comments

A gringo wins on a Honduran game show! Very much a gringo, Duzer wins the competition on the Honduran game show Fantastico.
posted by willthethrill at 6:45 AM PST - 12 comments

In April of 2001, a Cincinnati police officer shot an unarmed African-American teenager in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, sparking a summer of riots and violence. Now, a neo-Nazi group plans to march through Over-the-Rhine on April 20, with or without a permit, to celebrate the birthday of Adolph Hitler. The NAACP has demanded that police protection not be provided at taxpayer expense. In 2005, a march by the same group through a Toledo neighborhood did not end well.
posted by Otis at 6:43 AM PST - 69 comments

Dream Deceivers: The Story behind James Vance vs Judas Priest (1992) [google video 56 mins] ‘Just before Christmas 1985, James Vance and Ray Belknap shot themselves with a 12 – gauge shotgun. Their families blamed heavy metal group Judas Priest, claiming a recorded subliminal command “Do It” had mesmerized their son. Almost 5 years after the suicide pact James Vance et al. vs. Judas priest came to trial in Reno’s District Court’ (Warning: James Vance’s face may disturb some viewers). Also ‘Lessons from the Judas Priest Trial’ and ‘The Judas Priest Trial: 15 years later’.
posted by DOUBLE A SIDE at 4:02 AM PST - 82 comments

In their own words... Researchers at the National Institutes of Health recall the early years of AIDS, from diagnosis of the then-unknown disease, to discovering the viral cause, and from there to the search for treatments. The site features interviews (including several with virologist Robert Gallo), early publications, and a collection of archived image materials.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:35 AM PST - 11 comments

Top 100 watch sites on the web. Strangest watches, odd watches, tactical sniper watch, geek watches, TokyoFlash watches, abstract LED, math watches, Pimp watches, micromechanical engineering for connoisseurs. Nooka watches, USB Data Storage watch, dot matrix watch, futuristic cool vintage 1, 2 and 3, funkadelic diamond rotolog, not fussy about the exact time watch, Rolex or replica?, horological hallucination watches, solar powered braille watch, Philippe Starck style, war watches, our growabrain's super collection of timepieces. A brief history of watches.
posted by nickyskye at 11:22 PM PST - 34 comments

Shakespeare and Company, the first English/American bookshop and lending library in Paris, may be the most famous bookshop in history.
posted by serazin at 10:20 PM PST - 20 comments

Recent discussion regarding the iPhone availability in Canada (Rogers says they'll carry it - Then denies doing so) has spurred ideas as to what it might cost. This tore open a nasty wound in the hearts of Canadians, having realized that their mobile data access is worse than that of third world countries. A petition has already been started.
posted by patr1ck at 10:00 PM PST - 29 comments

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." - Jackie Robinson

This Sunday April 15, 2007, Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the breaking of baseball's color barrier. For one day, superstars and managers throughout the sport as well as entire teams will be saluting his memory by wearing Robinson's retired number 42. Robinson is honored for his tremendous leadership both on and off the field (previously), he is remembered for his determination in overcoming racial prejudice and hatred, and for his post-career activities as a civil rights advocate. Perhaps the highest compliment is to say simply that Jackie Robinson was one of the greatest players to ever grace a baseball diamond, but his contribution to baseball, and to equality in America was far greater than statistics and pennants.

"Mr. Rickey, do you want a ballplayer who is afraid to fight back?" "I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back!" See The Jackie Robinson Story, starring the man himself. (1:16:29, Google video)
posted by edverb at 8:43 PM PST - 20 comments

Martin Strel finishes 3272-mile swim through the Amazon River. BBC has an FAQ, and here are videos of Strel passing various checkpoints. Thing to avoid while swimming in the Amazon: the toothpick fish, aka the candiru. [previously]
posted by phaedon at 3:39 PM PST - 35 comments

"This is the shit JFK was getting jacked in his ass during the Cuban missile crisis. I shouldn't even be calling this shit 'shit,' because it's disrespectful." Following 72 hours in the lives of some high-roller meth addicts.
posted by chunking express at 2:55 PM PST - 101 comments

Can Wiki Travel? Ever try using Wiki Travel as your sole source of travel information? One man gives up his Lonely Planet and Fodor's and goes pure Wiki for a trip to Thailand -- and says it was a disaster. Anybody else have Wiki Travel horror stories?
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 2:49 PM PST - 38 comments

Porn for Women is a new photo book by the Cambridge Women's Pornography Collective that asserts that what really turns women on is a man who cleans the house and asks for directions. Others disagree. (All links SFW.)
posted by desjardins at 2:41 PM PST - 58 comments

Field of View's SPi-V engine (pronounced "spiffy") lets you take panoramic images from places like flickr, and turn them into interactive, full-screen environments. (note: shockwave required)
posted by Dave Faris at 2:15 PM PST - 6 comments

The gun markets of Pakistan (NWFP)
posted by theemperorhasnoclotheson at 1:45 PM PST - 41 comments

Bomb Iceland instead of Iran is the modest proposal of Princeton Professor of Political Economy Uwe Reinhardt in today's Daily Princetonian. Some enterprising Aussies are way ahead of him on that one. Heck, it wouldn't even be the first time the U.S. and Britain occupied Iceland. [via RÚV, the Icelandic state broadcaster]
posted by Kattullus at 1:04 PM PST - 24 comments

Punk Rock For the People States love symbols. Colorado has the Stegosaurus as its state fossil. New York has the Sugar Maple as its state tree. And every state has an official song. But what about an official punk rock song? Connecticut is leading the way. [warning: youtube / wikipedia / websites that were designed in frontpage 95 ]
posted by Stynxno at 12:22 PM PST - 27 comments

"To determine whether a diagram is good or bad, one needs to determine for what context it was designed for." PingMag (1, 2) interviews Andrew Vande Moere of infosthetics . A quick, informative read which includes pretty pictures of some MeFi faves.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:19 PM PST - 11 comments

Google Desktop for Mac OS X finally saw beta release last week; so far, the beta includes search but not Gadgets. Initial reactions have been tepid amid concern about how extensively the installer modifies your system. Nonetheless, some people seem to like it.
posted by myeviltwin at 12:05 PM PST - 65 comments

The death of Russia [google video]. A very interesting documentary made for Channel 4 in the UK on the state of modern Russia from Marcel Theroux. Marcel is older brother of Louis Theroux and son of the travel writer Paul. Marcel's documentary style is more sober than that of his brother and he deals with a tragic subject delicately and with a sympathetic tone. A very depressing but nonetheless very watchable documentary told by a literate, compassionate journalist. [48 minutes running time]
posted by ClanvidHorse at 12:05 PM PST - 18 comments

Name calling not unusual for Imus Imus has of course made an apology at his blog. And sometime soon, I expect, he will shoot off his big mouth again. His recent offensive remarks are not a new thing for this guy, a pompous "pundit," and simple "sorrys" would be ok except for his history of being a bad human being. And, yes: homophobic remarks too, lest he be accused of being picky in his hate
posted by Postroad at 10:52 AM PST - 160 comments

First Responder Training Sites. For police training purposes, in Southern California ten locations have been set up to look like "anytown, usa", where target practice & hostage situations are acted out. These areas are known in the industry as situation simulation villages, tactical training sites, or Hogan's Alleys (?). Emergency State is an online exhibit of over 200 photographs of these strange prop towns.
posted by jonson at 10:34 AM PST - 18 comments

Linking to someone's store usually isn't kosher, but Etsy user elloh's work is pretty unique. Featuring prints of her watercolor work for fairly low prices, her paintings focus on pop culture. There are moments from Office Space, Little Miss Sunshine, and Bob Ross immortalized in her art. But the cream of the crop is her series of portraits from The Office. Kevin, Creed, and Stanley are my faves and she even includes the UK version players as well.
posted by mathowie at 10:14 AM PST - 15 comments

Everyone needs more Kuler. There a lot of color pickers out there...and I generally like all of them...but Kuler takes things a step further by making a community of color and color themes. Of course it's tied with their products but that doesn't distract from the usefulness of this free online application. It is also a beautifully designed website both in form and function.
posted by rmmcclay at 7:41 AM PST - 14 comments

Are you annoyed that there is no species of blind cave spider named Sinopoda metafilteris or worm salamander named Oedipina bluepepsi? You can fix that for 3,000 Euros at the controversal BIOPAT. For inspiration, the Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature site collects the puns, insults, and other weirdnesses that can be found in the scientific names of various plants and animals [prev.]. Genes are not immune to weird names, especially in the case of the fruitfly, where clever naming is normal; but even better are the world's strangest dinosaur names, which allow you to tremble in fear in front of the bambiraptor and meet the Dragon King of Hogwarts.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:26 AM PST - 13 comments

Climate change fruitful for fungi: more than one third of the species recorded have started to fruit twice per year.
posted by prostyle at 7:25 AM PST - 15 comments

Clive James on Scams and Hoaxes. "If the flim-flam man is sensible enough to offer you a return of only twice as much, the scam might even work. I was once defrauded of a heartbreakingly-large sum by a fellow writer who was smart enough to offer no return at all. True to her word, she didn't return my money either."
posted by Blue Stone at 5:32 AM PST - 18 comments

All these worlds are yours, save Europa. Attempt no landings he...llo! What the hell is wrong with you!? Did you just nuke Jupiter?
posted by loquacious at 4:14 AM PST - 84 comments

PSAFilter: I was trained to do CPR wikipedia with a 15:1 compression to rescue-breath ratio. This is no longer recommended. In fact, for just-collapsed people, a recent study shows performing CPR without any-rescue breathing is better: although some think the type of collapse is important. Learn how to do CPR near you: any valid attempt at resuscitation is better than none. You could save a life.
posted by lalochezia at 10:50 PM PST - 28 comments

Boss Science: The Psychopathology of the modern American corporate leader. The personality which wins the promotion game has dubious overlap with characteristics of effective leadership. Many organizational psychologists argue that the "emergent" boss is often a narcissist who, because he "manages to act like he already is the boss," is "socially skilled at adjusting his personality," and is charismatic, rises and entrenches himself to the detriment of the organization. Some, though, "extol[] the virtues of the narcissist’s selfishness, ethical blindness, and lack of empathy as indispensable to being an agent of change in a large corporation—or the world."
posted by shivohum at 10:17 PM PST - 37 comments

Chaoscope fractals showcase the beauty of chaos. Flame fractals.
posted by nickyskye at 9:54 PM PST - 14 comments

Controversial Christian cartoonist Johnny Hart dies.
posted by naoko at 4:37 PM PST - 160 comments

Vibraphone Orchestra
posted by phrontist at 3:58 PM PST - 18 comments

Any MeFis running Boston a week from tomorrow? Good luck! And I hope you at least beat this guy (who I'm sure will become another paragraph in the race's colorful history).
posted by Kibbutz at 3:26 PM PST - 28 comments

Telephone excise tax refund
Get your $60 + bucks back from the government... and do something good with it (beware talking website). Via the always excellent Ian Masters today.
posted by specialk420 at 12:57 PM PST - 24 comments

Are you a Highly Sensitive Person? This trait ... is inherited by 15 to 20% of the population, and ... seems to be present in all higher animals. Being an HSP means your nervous system is more sensitive to subtleties. Your sight, hearing, and sense of smell are not necessarily keener .... But your brain processes information and reflects on it more deeply. Being an HSP also means, necessarily, that you are more easily overstimulated, stressed out, overwhelmed. This trait ... has been mislabeled as shyness (not an inherited trait), introversion (30% of HSPs are actually extraverts), inhibitedness, fearfulness, and the like. HSPs can be these, but none of these are the fundamental trait they have inherited ...
yahoo group | latest research (fascinating!) | newsletter | wikipedia | blog | via
posted by grumblebee at 12:19 PM PST - 144 comments

Citizen K Street: How Lobbying Became Washington's Biggest Business The story will begin in the newspaper and on the Web on March 4, with an overview of Cassidy's career. Then, beginning March 5 and running Monday through Friday for five weeks exclusively at washingtonpost.com/citizenkstreet, Kaiser will tell the story in a serial narrative that will chart Cassidy's path and the transformation of the lobbying industry in Washington.
posted by srboisvert at 11:56 AM PST - 5 comments

Fairy Tale Weddings for all -- Disney, under fire for discriminating at its parks, opens up its popular (and expensive!) Fairy Tale Weddings and Honeymoons to same-sex couples.
posted by amberglow at 10:59 AM PST - 35 comments

DayTrotter is a music site I'd never heard of before today. I haven't explored all of their free mp3 offerings yet, but this 4-song set of Bonnie "Prince" Billy tracks is lovely. Three of the tracks are from the Strange Form of Life EP and the fourth, to my knowledge, is previously unreleased. If you want the missing track, emusic (my via) sells it.
posted by dobbs at 10:50 AM PST - 10 comments

When you consume coconut meat, coconut milk or popcorn you are eating endosperm. The dark, unsettling world of plant sexuality.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:35 AM PST - 35 comments

Detainees are confined for 22 hours a day to individual, enclosed, steel cells where they are almost completely cut off from human contact. The cells have no windows to the outside or access to natural light or fresh air. No activities are provided, and detainees are subjected to 24 hour lighting and constant observation by guards through the narrow windows in the cell doors. They exercise alone in a high-walled yard where little sunlight filters through; detainees are often only offered exercise at night and may not see daylight for days at a time... It appears that around 80 per cent of the approximately 385 men currently held at Guantánamo are in isolation – a reversal of earlier moves to ease conditions and allow more socialising among detainees.

Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of isolation for detainees at Guantánamo Bay
Red Cross chief raises Guantánamo issue in D.C.
Guantánamo follies
posted by y2karl at 8:32 AM PST - 27 comments

Peeps Show. The Washington post was expecting a dozen or so entrants for the first-ever Peeps Diorama Contest. They got somewhere north of 350 from across the world. Photos.
posted by toxic at 5:32 AM PST - 23 comments

Sexy Witch: "This is a blog about sexy witches. Here you will find witches of all types: elegant, attractive, pretty, cute, hot, naughty or femme fatales; real life witches; people dressed up as witches: for halloween or fancy dress balls; fictional witches: witches in novels, plays and poems; movie witches; cartoon witches; witches in art: carved, painted, sketched and engraved: they are all here, or will be in time." (Some Images Not Safe For Work)
posted by LeeJay at 4:58 AM PST - 14 comments

Releaed British navy commander: We were gathering intelligence on Iran (Watch the interview)
Tony Blair: The sailors were on a legitimate UN mandate
The Observer: The MoD confirmed last night that the Iranians had made the claim that they had become interested in Cornwall's activities after learning about it on British television, but denied the decision to allow the ship's crew to be interviewed while on active duty had jeopardised the mission.
posted by hoder at 4:46 AM PST - 30 comments

The National Music Museum has photos and descriptions of a wealth of odd, beautiful and unusual historic musical instruments, including the schediphon, trombacello, Tristan trumpet, basset horn, lyre guitar, ophicleide... plus a few serpents. And if that doesn't satisfy your curvy horn jones, things get pretty serpentine here.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:39 AM PST - 5 comments

Magic Ink - Information Software and the Graphical Interface
posted by Gyan at 11:14 PM PST - 29 comments

The volcano Piton de la Fournaise on the island of Réunion has erupted. Réunion, 800km from Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is technically part of the EU as an overseas département of France. The latest eruption (BBC video, requires Realplayer) of Piton de la Fournaise has resulted in some beautiful photos Top right - Voir le diaporama.
posted by djgh at 9:29 PM PST - 12 comments

Please God, make everyone die. Amen. Todd Goliath, the creator of the infamous "Boys Are Stupid, Throw Rocks At Them" t-shirts/paintings/flash games/etc. (previously x2) has been discovered to have a piece in a gallery show which is remarkably similar to this Purple Pussy cartoon by Dave Kelly (a/k/a Schmorky) of Keenspot and SA. Not only that, but he's got another character, Eve L. who bears more than a passing resemblance to Lenore, The Cute Little Dead Girl by Roman Dirge. (other examples in the main link -- a surprisingly on-topic thread for SA)
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 6:40 PM PST - 100 comments

Ukiyo-e, a collection of dreamy, mostly charming, flash animations of Edo period Japanese paintings. Pictures of the floating world (everyday life) by Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro. Encyclopedic list of floating world images on the web. Hokusai sketches in flash. [related]
posted by nickyskye at 6:37 PM PST - 23 comments

Do The Right Thing (youtube) performed by little people muppet figures, set in Sesame Street.
posted by mathowie at 6:19 PM PST - 21 comments

Create political cartoons for your own enjoyment or to share with others. Quickcomic allows you to easily create, rate, and post your own insane scenarios using the characters of US and world politics. Hours of blog fodder await!
posted by PreteFunkEra at 6:18 PM PST - 18 comments

"These are my friends. I love their music. They are among the most important people in my life. The portrait is shattered because I could not make it whole." If you're bored this weekend, check out Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether. Each episode features a "landscape" (unusually-staged informal discussion) with a contemporary American composer, followed by a one-hour performance of his or her work. Subjects include the recently discussed Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and Philip Glass. More on Ashley from NewMusicBox and Ubu.
posted by roll truck roll at 3:11 PM PST - 7 comments

Berliner Trance. A 1993 documentary tracing the origins of modern trance music in East Berlin. Featuring interviews with many of the biggest names in trance, including a very young Paul Van Dyk, now currently ranked as the #1 DJ in the world.
posted by empath at 2:47 PM PST - 49 comments

The New York Sun endorses Dick Cheney for President. "For all the talk about potential candidates who haven't entered the 2008 presidential race ... the one that who would bring the most to the race is Vice President Cheney." That's an ... interesting ... notion.
posted by mojohand at 1:06 PM PST - 79 comments

Have you ever stopped to listen? I do, when it's not bad, always. I've missed trains, I've been late. I've given all the money I had on me. I've been reminded of - X -. I wish I had been there; I fucking love that Chaconne. It's like the perfect prayer.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:42 PM PST - 103 comments

"As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click 'deliver' on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss."
posted by danb at 11:28 AM PST - 70 comments

Bisphenol A: this extremely common chemical leaches out of food packaging and plastics, and was long considered safe. But a number of recent studies link it to developmental problems and cancer in lab animals in doses far lower than the current regulatory limit. Canada and the United States both review the scientific data available in the coming months, but critics already worry the process will be corrupted by industry. Industry, of course, insists that BPA is safe.
posted by mek at 10:16 AM PST - 31 comments

Scans from On Becoming a Woman by Harold Shryock, M.A., M.D. (1906-2004).
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:46 AM PST - 24 comments

Did the roof of the Pantheon influence Copernicus? Are the planets of the solar system aligned in accordance with a nearly-forgotten hypothesis known (unfairly) as Bode's Law? A fascinating wide-ranging discussion on BLDGBLOG with Walter Murch, the visionary editor and sound designer for such films as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, THX1138, and many others. [Murch's film work has previously been discussed here and here.]
posted by digaman at 8:21 AM PST - 20 comments

Behind Enemy Lines Liberal use of this narcotic produced with high voltage found to reduce the affects of PTSD, in coalition and British forces in particular.
posted by MapGuy at 7:59 AM PST - 29 comments

Google Patent Search can be a gold mine for a historical trivia. See the design for bucket seats patented by Steve McQueen, the secret communication system co-created by Hedy Lamarr that paved the way for the frequency hopping used by modern cell phones, the disposable infant garment made by Jamie Lee Curtis, the interactive music generation system made by Thomas Dolby of "She Blinded Me With Science" fame, and other unusual celebrity patents made by inventors that range from Abraham Lincoln to Zeppo Marx.
posted by jonp72 at 7:04 AM PST - 14 comments

For many, many years, my very favorite bad singer on this Earth has been Wing. I heart her, and I am actually not alone. Over the last 4 years, the endearingly earnest and impressively prolific Wing has gained international fame and made more money on her recordings than a majority of far, far more talented musicians. Yes, she is an acquired taste & many of you will have a different experience, but whenever I listen to her I smile from ear to ear -- both of which have delicate little streams blood trickling from them at the time. And so now I have the honor of presenting to you without further ado (drum roll please) our special guest entertainer for the day, the woman herself... Wing LIVE in concert. **Waves a lighter in the air**
posted by miss lynnster at 2:39 AM PST - 43 comments

Kermit has not done well since the death of Jim Henson...He's covered some sad songs , poured his heart out on myspace and picked up a new addiction.
posted by nile_red at 1:13 AM PST - 20 comments

The Hostile New Age Takeover of Yoga [print version]. Standard "omg commoditization" rant, but has a delectable anecdote wherein someone mistakes clingy navel-gazing for reflection. ("What part of no don't you understand?" his note said. "I never want to hear from you again.")
posted by Firas at 11:11 PM PST - 103 comments

Easter postcards from 1898 until today. See also Russian Easter postcards and the history of the Easter postcard tradition.
posted by Effigy2000 at 9:25 PM PST - 3 comments

Call 1-800-GOOG-411. Google Labs rolls out an experimental, free voice-based 411 service, where you can search by category ("Thai restaurants") or name. Unlike Free 411, there are no ads. Nifty service while we wait for Futurephone to return from the dead.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:22 PM PST - 20 comments

Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Discounted. A newly declassified report (PDF) by the Pentagon's inspector general claims that Iraq was not working with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion and that the intelligence was manipulated by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. On the same day as the report came out, Dick Cheney claimed that they did have a relationship via Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi may be dead, but he's still useful. [Via TalkLeft.]
posted by homunculus at 8:26 PM PST - 62 comments

OK, Here I go, I'm going to make this whole website right now on this dry-erase board.
posted by 31d1 at 7:25 PM PST - 93 comments

www.lodger.tv, the official website of the Finnish band Lodger (wikipedia, myspace), best known for their flash videos about love, death, crime and sex. I love death (flash) has been mentioned previously, but look out for God has rejected the western world (flash) and 24h candy machine (flash). They also made a video (flash) for LeLabo Fragrances, set to the tune of 24h candy machine. All flash movies are NSFW with music, same goes for the myspace link.
posted by kisch mokusch at 6:53 PM PST - 7 comments

Go faster, shoot tankers (flash)
posted by klangklangston at 5:59 PM PST - 20 comments

Doggy Dancing: Canine Freestyle.
posted by dilettante at 5:36 PM PST - 27 comments

Don Bolles arrested for soap possession? Germs drummer Don Bolles likes Dr. Bronner's Soap. Or maybe that should be past tense, as Orange County police have arrested him for drug possession, apparently over the hemp oil in his soap bottle. Friends are rallying to raise his bail, and asking sympathetic souls to spread the word.
posted by Scram at 5:27 PM PST - 62 comments

H
posted by Len at 4:44 PM PST - 50 comments

An Indonesian TV crew was invited to Malaysia for their Visit Malaysia Year 2007 campaign but encountered many problems. They write up about it - and start a flurry of comments and controversy across the Malaysian government about blogging. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 3:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Sgt. Pepper's 2.0 . fourty years later, BBC 2 is preparing a recording session (with the original recording instrumentation and Geoff Emerick) to be aired on 2 June. Oasis, The Killers, Razorlight, James Morrison, The Fratellis, Travis and the Kaiser Chiefs are the artists currently announced. Not the first time someone covers the Beatles (there's even a mashup, previously covered on Mefi).
[via]
posted by darkripper at 2:56 PM PST - 56 comments

Stanford's new Copyright Renewal Database makes searchable the copyright renewal records of books published from 1923-1963, previously very difficult to do. Between those dates, a renewal registration was required to prevent the expiration of copyright, so books not renewed are now in the public domain. Publishing scanned books on Internet Archive.
posted by stbalbach at 2:56 PM PST - 3 comments

Bay Area Yuri's Night 2007 Bay Area Yuri's Night 2007 Yuri's Night Bay Area will be held at Moffett Field in the NASA Ames Research Center's massive SOFIA hangar, home to the world's largest aerial observatory. Our host for the evening is pioneering space traveler Anousheh Anasari, the first privately funded female to reach orbit. She is joined by Dr. Chris McKay, world renowned expert in astrobiology and terraformation with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames Research Center, as they welcome you to a dazzling array of interactive art installations and science demos, interwoven with musical and acrobatic performances by some of the world's finest entertainers. Complete write up. Partially via MeFi's own lannanh.
posted by loquacious at 2:08 PM PST - 21 comments

Blog Against Theocracy --a blogswarm dedicated to the separation of church and state, ... Easter Weekend, April 6-8, 2007. Also see the non-profit joint venture between The Interfaith Alliance Foundation and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, First Freedom First.
posted by amberglow at 2:01 PM PST - 51 comments

In 1980 artist Lars Vilks began construction of two sculptures in Skåne, Sweden. The works—once they were found—were considered houses by the local authorities and therefore condemned because they were built on a nature reserve. After many lost appeals, Vilks protested by declaring the area as the micronation of Ladonia with the motto of suum cuique. And while there is no possibility of receiving work or actually living in Ladonia, you too can become a citizen of Ladonia. For a nominal fee you can even become nobility, and choose your own title!
posted by terrapin at 12:01 PM PST - 23 comments