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Welcome to the Orgasm & BrainWash Engineering Center where "BrainWash" is defined as an alternation of gene and enzyme expression in your 3 brains - the head, gut and pelvic cavity.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:01 PM PST - 10 comments

Arafat is dead. I cannot help to think that the fact that he had an iron grip on the PLO for so long made this issue so hard to resolve...but maybe after all this time there CAN be a final resolution on the question of the Palestinian state? Will we see massive internal warfare amongst his followers after he gets put in the ground? Interesting times, indeed.
posted by PeteyStock at 9:11 PM PST - 114 comments

The Dirty Punk Fuckin' Anarchy Machine !!
posted by mr.marx at 6:37 PM PST - 15 comments

YELLOW PERIL
"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
Sax Rohmer's tales of the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu and his arch enemy Sir Denis Nayland Smith of the British Secret Service (the nephew of Sherlock Holmes whose name is also invoked in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), have fascinated readers and cinemagoers alike for the best part of the twentieth century. Two things make Fu Manchu all the more monstrous a villain: his proximity to the West, and his intellect. His base is in Limehouse, the Chinese area of London. So by allowing him to live in the country, England is vulnerable to his insidious plans (and so becomes a validation of strict immigration policy). His intellect comes from Western learning, and it is often emphasized that he has been educated in a University. So we see the evil Asian as using the West's own knowledge against it.
It is up to Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie to stop Fu Manchu's plans in each story. As Smith remarks in The Hand of Fu Manchu, "the swamping of the white world by Yellow hordes may be the price of our failure." (more inside)
posted by matteo at 5:44 PM PST - 16 comments

Time-Life Navigation: "a synthesis of five inter-related elements: organization evolution (main change vehicle); life design (main change beneficiary); work life (career) evolution (main change initiator); financial investing (the golden goose); and a life navigation system (the action sequencer)."

Huh? While a bit more easily parsed than the famous TimeCube, I'm not sure where this falls on the sanity scale. If you paste the text into Notepad, sans all the crazy font effects, it begins to seem less bug-eyed. Crazy theory or just crazy web design? Wait, here's a site map graphic to clear it up...
posted by Tubes at 5:43 PM PST - 1 comments

Retirement Reality Check Lazy days for the current generation, mostly, but not for current working stiffs says Allstate. Since more and more states and cities are making homelessness illegal don't ever expect to get off the grind.
posted by billsaysthis at 4:00 PM PST - 13 comments

Science experiment: one bottle of vile, cheap vodka and a Brita water filter. Four filtrations later and it tastes better than Ketel One.
posted by starscream at 3:48 PM PST - 29 comments

The Japanese have a somewhat different conception of Ronald McDonald from what we have here in the states. (safe for work, Windows Media required)
posted by RylandDotNet at 3:16 PM PST - 19 comments

Wendy's Grill Skill [QuickTime] is a testament to training videos. They aim to educate and entertain. [originally via nassassin]
posted by pedantic at 3:08 PM PST - 19 comments

The Y-Leg Organism, including RAM, The Noseless Man, and exegesis on the Nature of Evil.
[via Banubula]
posted by kaibutsu at 2:21 PM PST - 2 comments

The Japanese Product Design Database features old product designs from the 60's on. Stuff like Sony's Portable Record Player (1982) and Suzuki's 360cc Micro Sportscar (1971). (via)
posted by Ufez Jones at 1:49 PM PST - 24 comments

This guy is such a dog. Misogyny, probably NSFW.
posted by xowie at 12:22 PM PST - 55 comments

Veiled Conceit is a blistering sendup of the New York Times wedding announcements.
Yes, that is Wolf Blitzer standing there, "stoned out of his mind and ogling a waitress."
posted by PrinceValium at 11:44 AM PST - 8 comments

The Arctic is melting, according to the Arctic Council report, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, which says the Arctic has lost 386,100 square miles of sea ice in the past 30 years, an area bigger than Texas and Arizona combined. A Pew Center report, Observed Impacts of Global Climate Change in the U.S., describes how global warming is disrupting animals, plants and insects. Perhaps it's all an E.U. conspiracy. WorldChanging has a world press roundup.
posted by homunculus at 11:26 AM PST - 33 comments

Do little people go to heaven? ...The scientists who have come up with these new Floresians do not count them among the ancestors of man, but among the collateral branches which died out, like the Neanderthals, only later. The suggestion is that the Floresians are, like us, rational animals. Now Christians believe that man (I mean homo, of course, not vir) is a special creation of God. Would these Floresians be in the image and likeness of God too, with immortal souls to be saved or lost, capable of praying to God and going to heaven? asks Christopher Howse.
posted by y2karl at 10:55 AM PST - 90 comments

Night Windows Gorgeous images of night-time urban Japan (Japanese titles, English alt tags, 1024x768 images available). Includes: sleeping bullet trains, trams, cats, Tokyo Harbour tunnel, bridges, tail lights, Narita airport, offices, Mount Fuji, Tokyo Disneyland (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and many more.
posted by carter at 10:26 AM PST - 13 comments

A web comic of some sort.
posted by kenko at 9:49 AM PST - 31 comments

Prussian Blue is a "white-power" band named after the color of the residue Zyklon-B leaves in a gas chamber. They do some originals, but mostly folk covers of neo-Nazi bands like Skrewdriver and RaHoWa. Oh, and they're twelve-year-old twin girls. (via Vice.)
posted by fungible at 9:38 AM PST - 37 comments

Enough Is Enough: It's time to stop dancing to "Hey Ya!" "As of today, November 10, 2004, it is one year since 'Hey Ya!' was released in the UK. So all you Beyonces, and Lucy Lius, and babydolls, GET OFF THE FLOOR." Further proof that Popjustice is the world's greatest pop magazine, if their review of Girls Aloud's What Will The Neighbours Say? with Neighbours-cast-members-out-of-ten ratings scale didn't already convince you. Oh, and "note to DJs: This is not an excuse to start playing 'Crazy In Love' again."
posted by logovisual at 9:19 AM PST - 10 comments

Note the officer seated to the Queen's right. found on DrudgeReport; accompanying story.
posted by alumshubby at 8:57 AM PST - 15 comments

Thomas Shine, a former Yale student, is suing David Childs for copyright infringement Mr. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for copyright infringement over the design of the Freedom Tower located at Ground Zero. Shine alleges in his lawsuit that the proposed Freedom Tower was "strikingly similar" to his "Olympic Tower" design for the proposed 2012 Olympic Games in New York.
posted by plemeljr at 8:10 AM PST - 21 comments

Editors Suck! Freelance writers will feel this author's pain. (Via Mediabistro. I believe registration is required. Sorry.)
posted by Man-Thing at 7:38 AM PST - 20 comments

Political discourse in these desperate days is - as we all know - very much a no-holds-barred affair. We have come to expect that political debate will be nasty, personal, based on appeals to emotion, and largely divorced from consideration of real-world consequences of the positions claimed. Still, I hope we can agree that some rhetorical flourishes are simply unacceptable in civil society. Like this piece of vileness from Adam Yoshida, imagining that "the future of the Democratic Party [is] providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women." You read that right: "comfort women." Left, right, or center, I hope we can all agree that we are within measurable distince of moral surrender if this sort of rhetoric goes unchallenged. Or is this really what we've come to? (Via Atrios, upon whose summary I cannot improve.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 7:24 AM PST - 62 comments

Mr. Green Jeans died and all I got was this lousy sweater. A packrat unearths his collection of hideous late 80s sweaters and shamelessly models them for all to see. A fashion cautionary tale. [via TheMorningNews]
posted by papercake at 7:12 AM PST - 7 comments

Arundhati Roy's call for action, on accepting the Sydney Peace Prize. (That's action from us specifically). I often find Roy's speeches overblown, overcooked and one-sided, and if that kind of rhetoric bothers you then you might want to skip this link. But she does speak lyrically, and I find it hard to argue against what she says this time.
posted by iffley at 3:27 AM PST - 7 comments