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Do Most People Even Know What They're Eating? Pork is served as veal; tilapia as red snapper and who knows what goes into sausages and other processed meat and fish products? You don't have to be an observant Jew or Muslim to be worried. How many years have those chicken pieces been frozen? How much pork and beef have been added to them? As food is increasingly disguised (fish fingers, chicken nuggets, beefburgers) to hide its origins, feeding on hypocritical popular revulsion with animals' existence, death - and carcasses! - aren't consumers setting themselves up for an ever greater measure of food fraud? That is, if they still care. (And no, it's not just an American phenomenon.) [Via The Daily Gullet. ]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 8:04 PM PST - 49 comments

The Making of a Sex Slave (NY Times; reg. req) The next time you seek comfort in the arms of a working girl, ask yourself if she's lying down with you because she likes the money or sex, of if she's doing it because she's been kidnapped, beaten, raped, taken to a foreign country where she doesn't speak the language, and told that the corrupt local police will murder a member of her family if she tries to escape. Prostitution might be victimless crime, but the horrors described here certainly aren't; the problem is, how's a john with a conscience going to tell the difference? A (much) longer report, terrifying in its thoroughness, on a topic lightly touched on here.
posted by hhc5 at 6:33 PM PST - 46 comments

More Mars Express images. The German space agency (DLR) has the biggest and fastest loading set of Mars Express images I've seen so far. Among them is one which apparently was not part of the press kit (it hasn't been in any MEX-related report), and is not on the official ESA site: This one. It shows the Spirit rover landing site in Gusev crater -- and the area is covered with a green substance. Olivine or salt, perhaps. It should be highly interesting to get spectral readings. [Note: These images are, to my knowledge, near true color like all other MEX/HRSC photos.]
posted by Eloquence at 5:36 PM PST - 14 comments

Friday Quicktime fluff. For all my good buddies from the "Trucker Fags in Denial" thread, below. This is why God gave us butts.
posted by jfuller at 5:29 PM PST - 13 comments

Amazon accepts political contributions? Amazon.com takes the friction out of grass-roots contributions to presidential candidates. 1-Click® payments are the easiest way to make small contributions--from $5 to $200.
posted by mrgrimm at 5:09 PM PST - 3 comments

With all the matchmaking services around it was only a matter of time for presidentmatch.com to show up.
posted by john at 5:06 PM PST - 18 comments

Helmut Newton Killed in Crash Photographer Helmut Newton lost control of his Cadillac while leaving the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood and crashed into a wall across the street. (more inside)
posted by matteo at 4:36 PM PST - 11 comments

Revolution by Design: The Soviet Poster
Amazing examples of graphic design from the masters of propaganda. For those of you feeling a little revolutionary this weekend!
posted by hypnorich at 2:12 PM PST - 6 comments

CrewPix photos shot by film, tv and commercial crew members.
posted by turbodog at 2:11 PM PST - 1 comments

Climb the Plantation. [flash]
posted by hama7 at 1:54 PM PST - 6 comments

Wonkette. Like Gawker, but for Washington, DC.
posted by brownpau at 1:20 PM PST - 6 comments

Head US WMD Hunter Gives Up After stepping down, Mr Kay told Reuters news agency that he did not believe there were any large stockpiles of such weapons in existence in Iraq. Mr Kay is being succeeded by former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer. Earlier this month, Mr Duelfer said he believed the chances of finding chemical or biological weapons in Iraq now were close to nil, the BBC's Jon Leyne in Washington reports. Woo-hoo? mrmanley? Time for that Right-wing apology!
posted by Perigee at 1:14 PM PST - 64 comments

Andre 3000, Meet Schroeder. Well, it's not flash, but it's good for a Friday... Charlie Brown meets OutKast.
posted by djspicerack at 1:13 PM PST - 32 comments

You may be familiar with the story, reported here, about the southern California watch maker who supplied wrist watches for Mars scientists to get to work on time. You may not have seen these time applications that make the time story equally as compelling for the rest of us. What is interesting from a graphics standpoint is the different qualities expressed with these versions, as a table of exact times for specific locations (this site has a lot of great detail about the mission), or as an approximate time with shadows projected on the Mars map (for Mac OS X). Any other Mars time graphics that you know about?
posted by xtian at 12:05 PM PST - 5 comments

The Aerial Reconnaissance Archive is a new online archive of World War II reconnaissance photos, which will eventually include 5 million photos. The BBC has some background information, including an interview with a former Photographic Reconnaissance Unit pilot.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:51 AM PST - 3 comments

His mission: To eat three meals a day for 30 days at McDonald's and document the impact on his health. "It was really crazy - my body basically fell apart". Spurlock charted his journey from fit to flab in a tongue-in-cheek documentary which he has taken to the Sundance Film Festival.
posted by stbalbach at 10:00 AM PST - 63 comments

Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) dead at age 76.
posted by machaus at 9:57 AM PST - 35 comments

The Real Story of the Kelly Family. Two sisters of the Kelly family depicted in the ABC show, "Married to the Kellys", comment on the show, and how it compares to the real family. Sorta cute and interesting to see how art imitates life and life imitates the art imitating life.
posted by riffola at 9:53 AM PST - 3 comments

I know that we can't have a pony, but Don and Janet Burleson think that they'd make great guide animals. An informal poll done by the Discovery Channel found that 27% of people would actually prefer a guide horse over a dog, and there seem to be a couple of success stories out there. My first thought after I stopped laughing was clean-up... Of course not everyone thinks it's funny.
posted by togdon at 9:52 AM PST - 6 comments

[Warning: AppleFilter] Apple provides customized RSS feeds from iTunes store.
posted by anathema at 9:45 AM PST - 2 comments

Popdork [ indie rock satire and hipster humor ]
posted by shoepal at 9:41 AM PST - 5 comments

Most Sense-Assaulting Flash Game Ever
posted by Orange Goblin at 8:28 AM PST - 18 comments

TRASHLOG — or — arresting and acute observation of ordinary offal.
posted by pedantic at 8:09 AM PST - 5 comments

Tinygrow and 6+=1, by Shinichiro Sato.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:59 AM PST - 7 comments

My Yahoo's rss aggregator (beta) might be just the ticket for getting regular folks consuming blogs in a big way. Or RSS could remain the provence of the geeks. Thoughts? Is this the beginning of RSS for the people?
posted by christina at 7:59 AM PST - 5 comments

Even better than flash Friday?
European Mars Express probe confirms water ice on Mars
posted by magullo at 7:50 AM PST - 13 comments

Burns Night. 'Robert Burns: poet and balladeer, Scotland's favourite son and champion of the common people. Each year on January 25, the great man's presumed birthday, Scots everywhere take time out to honour a national icon. Whether it's a full-blown Burns Supper or a quiet night of reading poetry, Burns Night is a night for all Scots.'
More on the Robert Burns Tribute site.
posted by plep at 6:26 AM PST - 3 comments

African-American == Black? Several high-school students at a predominantly white (well, predominantly NOT black) Nebraska high school were disciplined for a campaign to get 16-year-old student Trevor Richards awarded the school's annual "Distinguished African-American Student" award. Richards is from South Africa, now lives in America (not sure if he's a citizen, the CNN story isn't clear), but here's the catch: he's white.
posted by Bluecoat93 at 5:49 AM PST - 111 comments

"They get unfairly maligned simply because of their past association with me," said Dick Cheney in a Fox Radio interview. No, I think it's the graft and corruption but that's just my opinion. WSJ reports that Halliburton Employees Take took $6M in kickbacks in awarding Iraq contracts. In every {war|conflict|police action} I'm sure there's been some amount of war profiteering, but this really takes the falafel. There was so much controversy surrounding this war that this finding brings into question the whole Bush-Cheney-Halliburton Old Boy Network. Check out all Halliburton news at Topix.net.
posted by cpfeifer at 5:43 AM PST - 7 comments

Google (kinda) Offers Social Networking called Orkut
Acording to this CNET artice, Orkut is the outgrowth of a personal project by Google Engineers Orkut Buyukkokten. He created "Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects". And oh, by the way:

"Membership to orkut is by invitation only.
If you have a friend who's a member of orkut, have them invite you to join."
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 1:01 AM PST - 32 comments

A Requiem for Mr. Rogers got me thinking about the TV shows that spoke to me as a child. Captain Kangaroo was there and Mr. Dressup was always great. But for me, no one surpassed The Friendly Giant and "Look up. Look way up!" still makes me feel warm and safe. I did not have PBS available as a child but my sons did and for them Mr. Rogers was a favorite as was TVO's Today's Special with Jeff Hyslop's manikin who came to life each night. Who spoke to you via TV as a child? Parents, who is speaking to your children on TV these days?
posted by arse_hat at 12:55 AM PST - 25 comments

Lunch. [Quicktime, resizes screen, possibly NSFW, via MonkeyFilter.]
posted by homunculus at 12:23 AM PST - 9 comments