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Mel Lyman 1938-1978. Mel Lyman was controversial. He was the brilliant folk musician who soothed the Dylan-ruffled crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the Fort Hill guru whose prose in the undergound newspaper Avatar shocked conservative Bostonians of the late 60s... Many years of collecting, and help from numerous people has resulted in the large collection of articles reproduced here. Some say Lyman was God... others that he was a devil... but most of these articles show him as a charismatic individual somewhere between those two extremes. An exhaustively authoritative page about a very interesting harmonica player who became God. And, man, does this bring back the 60s...(Details within)
posted by y2karl at 11:28 PM PST - 21 comments

Mr Mittens, proving weed isn't good for you. A group of guys smoke a LOT of weed and then they write and record songs while high. This results in some funnily crazy and extremely odd recordings (featuring lyrics such as 'I wish my deodorant would kill me') They have about 20-30 mp3s available for download and sadly enough my modem will be getting them all in the next 24 hours..
posted by wackybrit at 8:06 PM PST - 9 comments

74th Annual Academy Awards aka The Oscars are on. History was made tonight? or just the same old, same old? Please note the discussion may give away the winners, as does the linked page.
posted by riffola at 6:44 PM PST - 157 comments

Rustboy, a short film about a Pinocchio/Frankenstein-esque robot child almost a year in the making thus far, has up until recently been illustrator Brian Taylor's personal side project. He's been keeping a diary of the process on his site and posting movie clips, storyboard sketches, and descriptions of how he achieves various effects the whole time. Followers of the site recently got the good news that Taylor has received funding to work on Rustboy full-time beginning in April. I've bookmarked it so I can check in every so often and say, "MAN, I wish I could do that!"
posted by apollonia6 at 12:40 PM PST - 22 comments

Modifyme.com is the one amazing Flash app. Crank up your speakers and make weird electronic music by making colored tiles fly around your browser window! (Sort of). It is just impossible to describe, and totally amazing.
posted by josh at 11:46 AM PST - 14 comments

All right, so maybe everyone's seen this -- I have no sense of just how much of a meme it's become -- but a Mefi search didn't turn up any previous links, so hey. This, ladies and gentlemen, is The Official Ninja Homepage, with the divine URL of "realultimatepower.net." And, err, yes, I do think there's irony involved.

Hi, this site is all about ninjas, REAL NINJAS.  This site is awesome.    My name is Robert and I can't stop thinking about ninjas.  These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet. The "Big Pimpin" MIDI gives it a nice touch, I think. (I also recommend the Scripts. They're like Hemingway.)

Personally speaking, I'm officially done with the internet now. Nobody's ever going to make a better website.
posted by logovisual at 11:36 AM PST - 7 comments

Where were you during Vietnam?
Emi's Online Anti-War Anthology
"The only way to uncover the real truth about the antiwar movement is for hundreds (or thousands) of people to come forward and contribute their recollections. That is why history needs your stories. Please submit them. I don't care how insignificant you think your story may be. Everybody's story is important. All relevant stories will be accepted. I will be happy to work with anyone who wants to prepare one."
posted by sheauga at 10:26 AM PST - 8 comments

"Basically, we are going to argue Professor Mann was discriminated against because he is a cyborg," As was discussed a few days ago, Steve Mann is the first (?) cyborg. People at the airport did not seem to be impressed. After a stripsearch, he had to go to a hospital. So now we have the first 'cyborg rights' lawsuit.
posted by swordfishtrombones at 10:13 AM PST - 13 comments

Study: Mobile Phone Users Worse Than Drunk Drivers
It took mobile users half-a-second longer to react than normal, and one-third of a second longer than when they had been drinking.
They were also less able to maintain a constant speed and found it harder to keep a safe distance from the car in front. Participants in the study stated that they found it easier to drive drunk than when using a cell phone.
Here's the fun quote:
"Eventually," said Dominic Burch, road safety campaign manager at Direct Line, "we would like to see the use of mobile phones when driving, both hand-held and hands-free, become as socially unacceptable as drink driving."
Nice graphic Here that explains the time/distance it takes to stop. That fraction of a second = +46 feet stopping time over normal, and +33 over being drunk. More Here and The Full Report[PDF].
posted by Blake at 9:09 AM PST - 61 comments

I mourned Sassy, too! "Darren E. Burrows is to Keanu, as Samantha Mathis is to Winona Ryder, as Joan Collins is to Elizabeth Taylor, as Jason Priestley is to johnny Depp, as Luke Perry is to James Dean, as Caludia Schiffer is to Brigette Bardot, as Bill Clinton is to JFK, as YM is to Sassy." --Christina Kelly,in her "What Now" column, Sassy, May 1992. And wouldn't you know it, she's now the editor-in-chief of YM. (Yes, I know this post won't make sense to anyone who wasn't a teenage girl in the early '90s.)
posted by lillitot at 7:07 AM PST - 23 comments

Who needs a US disinformation campaign when the Brits will do it for them? (maybe, because we're not very good at it?) "Tony Blair's senior foreign policy adviser, David Manning, planted story of terror lab find in cave in Afghanistan to justify the deployment of 1,700 Royal Marines" - a White House spokesman said "we have received no specific intelligence on a chemical or biological weapons facility". I'm tired of being taken like this - as a dumb schmuck who'll consume the lies which hack politicos generate for their own murderous ends, and not protest.
posted by dash_slot- at 5:40 AM PST - 19 comments

Future Development for Sony and the PSX2 and PSX3. Now that the Game Developers Conference is over what do you think of the plans for the PSX3? It may even have an IBM architecture underneath.
posted by AsiaInsider at 4:47 AM PST - 7 comments

The Worst LiveJournal Icons? Vindictive?
posted by feelinglistless at 4:42 AM PST - 11 comments