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Do you want fries with that house? Not content with a normal McMansion, the Banner family of Potomac, Md. upgraded four years ago from a 4,500 square foot house to a 8,500 square foot house. Its six bedrooms and nine bathrooms now comfortably accomodate the house's two adults and two children. The unusually ironic NYTimes (reg req.) article does not spare us the absurdities of this arrangement, a growing trend in wealthy suburban enclaves. Interior decorators must now "supersize" furniture to fill up a cavernous "media room". Entire wings of the house sit unused for months, because the suburban rich entertain others at home no more often than their middle-class counterparts.

Suppose you had a $500k income and a completely empty 2 acre zoned lot in Potomac in which to live. What might you build there?
posted by PrinceValium at 11:33 PM PST - 52 comments

If at first you don't succeed... Venezuelan army officers tell the Christian Science Monitor they're planning another coup attempt. Other signs: Ten masked men criticized President Chavez on TV last week, protests are mounting and, oh, those 50 tanks you see over there? Don't be alarmed. They're just "rehearsing" for the July 5 Independence Day parade, which also happens to be the day Chavez may try to clean house during an annual round of military promotions. Ruh-roh. The good news: On June 10, workers at the country's largest newspaper released a statement denouncing last April's media manipulation by wealthy owners and promised to fight if it happened again. And everyone's favorite meddling Baptist has announced he's heading to the area. (More inside)
posted by mediareport at 8:06 PM PST - 22 comments

If Karl Rove is allowed to use PowerPoint, the terrorists will have won. It's amazing that this master operative is using the same cheesy graphics, poor font choices, and cliched business terms ("synergies") as your boss, but it's true--when his intern dropped a disk with this thing on it, it got into the hands of Roll Call.

Note especially slide 21 and slide 26--apparently Florida is a "Special Concern"

Via the NY Observer's Joe Conason
posted by lackutrol at 4:04 PM PST - 13 comments

The Library of Congress blew it. I watched some of the hearings about the CARP-proposed webcasting fees, and I had the impression that the people at the Library got it. I was wrong. So instead of having all their limbs chopped off, webcasters can now expect only to be cut off at the knees. The end result will be the same, though; say goodbye to Internet radio.
posted by geneablogy at 2:40 PM PST - 30 comments

more bad news on the global warming front is there any leadership whatsoever from the whitehouse on this issue? oh, thats right... theres a war on terrorism goin on...
posted by specialk420 at 2:39 PM PST - 15 comments

but does it have vibrate? A prototype tooth implant which picks up digital signals from radios and mobile phones goes on show at the Science Museum in London this week.
posted by moth at 2:34 PM PST - 14 comments

Newsguru is an "experiment in randomized photojournalism." Unfortunately, it doesn't have the bombardment value that My Left Asscheek(hee!) did, which strangely enough, they bought. Or, maybe, it just made for a great "press release" title.
posted by Su at 2:11 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

And The Winner Is....
Hurray! I can finally sleep at night, the new M&M color is Purple. The intro is a bit annoying, but the flash page they have to show voting stats by country is kinda nifty. mmmmmm...purpliscious
posted by Blake at 1:54 PM PST - 25 comments

The new money will be called NexGen™
The Treasury and Federal Reserve make it official: Starting in 2003, U.S. currency will have pretty colors. But they don't say which colors! I say we MeFis oughta lift our voices high with suggestions on what colors our $100, $50, $20 and $10 bills should be.
Is anyone else creeped out that they call the money "NexGen"? It sounds so ... Orwellian.
posted by Holden at 12:40 PM PST - 102 comments

Will electronic music ever break in the US? DJs don't speak. Most don't produce their own full-length albums. When they perform, their only motions are precise hand movements and brief shuffles to record bins that are obscured from view and confined to a 5-foot square area. There are no David Lee Roth jump kicks, synchronized boy-band dances, Michael Jackson moonwalks or Janet Jackson ass-shaking. For American consumers, this is a problem.
posted by fellorwaspushed at 11:47 AM PST - 73 comments

Gifted elementary kids in California could go straight to college. Students of any age, even kindergarten, could demand to take the state's high school proficiency examination under legislation approved recently by the Assembly. Passage of the test -- which measures reading, writing and arithmetic skills -- would qualify young students to enter community colleges as if they had obtained their high school diplomas.

Academically, these kids may be ready for college, but are they mature enough to handle being surrounded by students six to ten years their senior?
posted by DakotaPaul at 10:58 AM PST - 42 comments

If you're vegan, this link is what you need to figure out what the hell is really in your food. If you're not vegan, you might find it interesting as well. If you're a total metavore, no, we can't eat our clones yet... bummer.
posted by jcterminal at 10:34 AM PST - 65 comments

Feeling small or feeling big? 39 orders of magnitude that take you from the Milky Way to the proton in an oak leaf.
posted by Chief Typist at 10:10 AM PST - 9 comments

An asteroid the size of a football field just missed the Earth last Friday. Coming in fast out of the sun, where we ain't watching, it missed us by an astro-paltry 75,000 miles (a third the distance to the Moon). If it had hit, the impact would have been about 10 megatons -- not a planet-killer, but enough to spoil your picnic.

In related news, Attorney General Ashcroft arrested a box of moon rocks and the entire staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA for questioning. The director of the Office of Orbital Security was at a pro-am golf tournament in Fond du Lac, WI and unavailable for a statement.
posted by anser at 9:45 AM PST - 39 comments

"Welcome to www.villainsupply.com, your best online source for everything EVIL. If you are a supervillain, mad scientist, warlord, dictator, or despot, then this is the place for you."

Need a doomsday device? Gear for your henchmen? How about an impenetrable fortress? Save 35% on the Orbital Space Station!
posted by starvingartist at 9:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Betty Crocker makes it easy to eat well. On her website she has (among other things) a dinner planner, a page that figures out what groceries you need for a given set of recipes, and my favorite, a page where you input your ingredients, and she tells you what you can make with them! Everybody eats, and most of MeFi is just news or pop culture, so I think this is incredibly appropriate. What other uses do MeFites get out of the web, besides news, games, and their daily pr0n fix?
posted by taumeson at 9:00 AM PST - 18 comments

NPR.com is now asking that you request permission to link to content on their site. What is the rational behind this? I could see how the dallas news was concerned with losing advertising revenu when they banned deep linking, but if I'm not mistaken, NPR is non-profit, right? What gives?
posted by Hackworth at 8:34 AM PST - 30 comments

"Soccer scolds" attack! The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last has had it with gushing soccer writers like Slate's David Thomson ("[Soccer is] something made out of muscle, speed, grace and the soul") who see American lack of enthusiasm for the sport as a deep-seated national character flaw worthy of dire-sounding pronouncements. Is he right, or, as The San Francisco Chronicle would have it, can soccer really bring world peace?
posted by transona5 at 8:21 AM PST - 29 comments

Seems that public discontent with with the state of radio is finally being heard at some major outlets. The most telling part of the story is this: Those most likely to turn off the radio: teen-agers, long among the medium's mainstays. Along with MTV, the radio practices mentioned in this article are the reason a lot of good music never gets heard. A listener said it best: He longs for the free-form format of his teen years, when you could hear anything from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello, the Supremes to the Sex Pistols. . Are you listening Clear Channel? And more important are we? I'm still of the opinion that (pending legaliteis aside) the internet will be what saves radio, but it's not quite there yet.
posted by jonmc at 8:10 AM PST - 38 comments

Supreme Court says no to executions of mentally disturbed people. Wow.
posted by dwivian at 8:03 AM PST - 73 comments

"It's not just that you have no right to a lawyer, it's that you have no right to even have a hearing," he said. "If that is true, then there is really no limit to the President's power to label U.S. citizens as bad people and then have them held in military custody indefinitely." Okay, someone please tell me that's not as scary as it sounds.
posted by donkeyschlong at 7:42 AM PST - 37 comments

http://www.nlcnet.org/bangladesh/index.html "For the last 8 years, young women at the Shah Makdhum factory in Bangladesh have been forced to work over 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, denied maternity benefits, beaten and paid just 15 cents for every $17.99 Disney shirts they sewed." "Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, pays himself $133 million a year, or about $63,000 and hour. It would take a worker in Bangladesh sewing Disney garments for 12 cents an hour 210 years to earn what Eisner does in an hour."
posted by headlemur at 6:54 AM PST - 55 comments

Ease of Use? IBM sends mixed message... see how complicated the instructions are to order this poster.
posted by TNLNYC at 6:01 AM PST - 15 comments

BBC presents: The Science of Superheroes! Ever wonder how Spider-Man climbs on walls? How do lie detectors such as Wonder Woman's lasso work? What was gravity like on planet Krypton? The BBC takes a scientific look at our favorite superheroes to teach the physics behind the fantasy.
posted by phatboy at 4:15 AM PST - 8 comments

Ready To Rumba? Or Samba? Will England or Brazil go through in tomorrow's crucial World Cup game? Predict at your peril. I'd love Brazil to win but, no doubt influenced by the treacherous utterances of Pele and Jairzinho[see penultimate link], say England will tragically but deservedly win 2-1.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 1:09 AM PST - 36 comments