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John Elway gets the ball to the 18-yard line. Mark Harmon (not that Mark Harmon...) kicks the field goal to bring his team one point ahead with 4 seconds left on the clock. Kevin Moen catches the ball on the return kick, laterals to Richard Rodgers, who laterals to Dwight Garner. Garner laterals back to Rogers who then shovels the ball to Mariet Ford. Ford then passes back to Moen, who finishes what he started by tackling trombonist Gary Tyrrell in the end zone. So ends the 1982 "Big Game" between UC Berkeley and Stanford. So begins the legend of the weirdest play in the history of college football, complete with audio (wav file).
posted by jonp72 at 9:19 PM PST - 22 comments

"In the early 1900's, every music production company had a piano in the office, and from the street you could hear people banging away. Many of these pianos were made by William Tonk & Brothers at 10th Avenue and 35th Street. The pianos and the sounds they made soon became known as honky tonk." (An education in American roots music from NPR, with lots of lovely audio. There's an awful lot on this site to explore, so if you're looking for a place to start, well, it was this segment on Bob Wills that hooked me. Alternatively, the segment on Norteña accordion music or the introductory segment on the changing role of women in country music are also worth highlighting.) [real audio]
posted by .kobayashi. at 9:18 PM PST - 4 comments

Three great interviews in Salon: Former Senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland on the stonewalling of the 9/11 commission and the situation in Iraq, author Jessica Stern (previously discussed here) on the recent bombings in Istanbul and Riyadh, and executive director of Amnesty International USA William Schulz on why the left must confront terror with the same zeal that it battles Bush, or risk irrelevance.
posted by homunculus at 9:06 PM PST - 5 comments

Now Suzanne takes your hand
and she leads you to the river

The Story of Suzanne
posted by y2karl at 8:52 PM PST - 33 comments

Jaron Lanier talks about philosophy, computer science and physics. Suppose poor old Shroedinger's Cat has survived all the quantum observation experiments but still has a taste for more brushes with death. We could oblige it by attaching the cat-killing box to our camera. So long as the camera can recognize an apple in front of it, the cat lives.
posted by kliuless at 8:18 PM PST - 11 comments

A great PETA ad...for me to poop on! Amusing recent campaign featuring Triumph the Insult Dog to promote spaying/neutering that is catching heat for a subtle Clay Aiken jab.
posted by mathowie at 4:05 PM PST - 37 comments

Pssst! Wanna Buy A Reliable, Second-Hand Car? You could do worse than start with Honest John, a plain-speaking, fiercely independent Cockney motor car wonk who'll see you right, no problem. If you're obsessive about reliability, i.e. don't have the time or inclination to look after your wheels and just want the damn thing to get you from A to B and back again, check out the often surprising Reliability Index for the most and least trustworthy automobiles. [Eurocentric warning! Btw, what are the most reliable independent car guides - preferably free and online - in the U.S, Canada, etc?]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 2:42 PM PST - 32 comments

What should I do if the internet goes down?
posted by Orange Goblin at 2:38 PM PST - 14 comments

del.icio.us is a remotely hosted app that will let you quickly add links, which you can integrate into your site like the pros.
posted by riffola at 2:09 PM PST - 13 comments

BBC lists 50 places to see before you die. Overall, choices are a bit too exotic for my own taste (only four European cities???) and I still consider Bali a wildly overrated place, but what's really shocking is kitschy Las Vegas at #7 and La Serenissa Repubblica di Venezia at #18. What happened to the British tradition of extolling Italy's beauty? via Attu
posted by 111 at 1:33 PM PST - 54 comments

Perpetuating a common misconcetion about the "Morning After" pill and RU-486 Avrum Bluming, determined that my mom should try an experimental treatment, mifepristone, a synthetic antiprogestin better known as RU-486, the "morning after" contraception drug. In a little throw-away line, Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer perpetuates the idea that RU-486 and the "Morning After" pill are the same thing. They are entirely different. In fact, mifepristone is not a contraceptive at all. Regardless of anyone's opinion about these two products, shouldn't Scientific American know better than to mistake the purpose of an FDA-aproved prescription drug?
posted by antimony at 12:34 PM PST - 22 comments

Just who is this Ahmad Chalabi guy ?
posted by jpoulos at 11:15 AM PST - 13 comments

seamonster [note" flash]
posted by crunchland at 11:06 AM PST - 4 comments

Happy Thanksgiving! A friend told me the story of Corn Hill the other day (the house he grew up in is right across the street), so I decided to check out what the internet has to say about the situation. Not much apparently. This ugly website is the only other one I found that didn't say that the pilgrims "borrowed" from a "cache" of corn that they "stumbled upon". What's really crazy is that the pilgrims had never seen corn, nor native americans. This means that they either started digging for fun, or found out about the Wampanoag burial traditions and decided it was a good idea. Either way, happy Grave Robbing Day!
posted by magikeye at 11:04 AM PST - 27 comments

In the United States, the cover of Paul Krugman's new book is a little bit different than the cover in England. (from Atrios)
posted by limitedpie at 10:19 AM PST - 26 comments

Google House. A visual art page using google's image search. [Note - some parts of the house are NSFW. via BoingBoing]
posted by srboisvert at 10:11 AM PST - 4 comments

The President Calling: American Radioworks (MPR) explores the secret phone tapes of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. AFAIK, the content is all previously available, but online, they've packaged and annotated it for ease of use. It's not exhaustive, but the moments picked out are often illuminating, showing "how each man used one-on-one politics to shape history." You might want to start here.
posted by soyjoy at 9:02 AM PST - 5 comments

Santorum. Dan Savage is a man on a mission: he wants his coinage of "santorum" to go all the way to the top of a Google search for "santorum", and he's calling on bloggers to help him do it. The comments of Senator Santorum (R-Homophobia) on the Supreme Court's anti-sodomy case were previously discussed here.
posted by UKnowForKids at 8:48 AM PST - 25 comments

That makes four bombings in the last six days in Turkey. Pro-intervention or anti-invasion, I can't tell what I think anymore.
posted by Leonard at 7:38 AM PST - 105 comments

"Four score and seven years ago..."
Yesterday was the 140th anniversary of Lincoln's famous address. There is only one known photograph of President Lincoln at Gettysburg (here's the detail view if you're having a hard time spotting him). The Library of Congress website explains that the image sat for more than half a century in the National Archives before anyone recognized President Lincoln in it.
posted by Irontom at 6:31 AM PST - 21 comments

What part of no do ya still not understand? Date rape in the time of Kobe, roofies and Girls Gone Wild. By Judith Lewis, with bonus 'toon by Ellen Forney.
posted by xowie at 6:11 AM PST - 85 comments

Interesting Column by Tim Whitaker, editor at Philadelphia Weekly, who "kind of jests" someone should order the main branch of the Free Library at 19th and Vine streets gutted, all the passé books written by the long since dead and decayed--books that nobody looks at anyway, thrown out, and replaced with computers.
This could be done over a long weekend, and the new Free Workstation Center of Philadelphia would open. Thousands of city residents who'd been priced out of the Information Revolution for well over a decade would rush to the free computers to experience the online rush that comes with access to the WWW.
He says Amazon's new service "search inside the book" is the first glimpse of a full-bore revolution in the way research will be conducted and books will be distributed in the future that spells the death of libraries.
He bounced this idea off of Steven Levy, a Philadelphia native who writes about technology for Newsweek, and he says "It's not that crazy, The future of libraries is a hot topic with librarians all over the country."
"Once the Web has become a full-service digital archive of the whole wide written word, it'll only be a quick innovation or two before we'll have the technology to order and bind books on our own home book-printing systems. Ebooks will finally become reality. Libraries will become mini-museums, where old books are kept under glass, relics of the pre-"inside the book" revolutionary age."
posted by Blake at 5:40 AM PST - 22 comments

Stephen King's National Book Award acceptance speech "took the award to task." In his National Book Award acceptance speech, King criticizes and condemns the divisive clash between highbrow and lowbrow literary cultures. NPR audio highlights and post-award interview. To a degree, he blames the National Book Foundation itself for the divisiveness. His acceptance speech revisits many of the points in the previous archived discussion when the award was announced. Stephen King, Mefi snooper?
posted by basilwhite at 4:47 AM PST - 16 comments

Smoking kills (Flash)
posted by Mwongozi at 4:46 AM PST - 13 comments

Yeah baby! Bite my toenails! Funny, sad, simple, sweet, it's all about the luuurve. Remics Vol. 3 features illustrations by 29 artists on the theme of "love"; past editions (Flash and some sound) explored thoughts on "Place" and "Birthday".
posted by taz at 3:08 AM PST - 7 comments

Lichens of North America 'This website grew out of the activities of Sylvia and Stephen Sharnoff, who did the photographic fieldwork for the book Lichens of North America, by Irwin M.Brodo and the Sharnoffs, published in November, 2001 by Yale University Press ... ' - the human uses of lichens, a lichen sampler, lichen portraits ('This lichen is used medicinally in India as a poultice to induce copious urination, as a linament and an incense for headaches, and also as a powder to help wounds heal.') ... more lichen links.
Related interest :- The Hidden Forest, photos of lichens, fungi, mosses and slime moulds of the New Zealand bush.
posted by plep at 3:01 AM PST - 21 comments