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South Park does the "Aristocrats" joke. (WARNING! Windows Media file, very very not safe for work.) "The Aristocrats" is a long-lived comedians' in-joke--or, rather, an extraordinarily filthy joke that's not really a joke. (Gilbert Gottfried knocked 'em dead with it shortly after 9/11.) Now it's going public (sort of): Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza are making a movie featuring over 100 comedians telling their own versions. The South Park version linked above is "not even in the top 5 for dirtiest." Yikes!
posted by 88robots at 10:52 PM PST - 54 comments

CheesyJesus.com --Beyond the Jesus Action Figure, this is also your home for lovely Last Supper Wall Tapestries, Mosque Alarm Clocks, "Wash Away Your Sins" Bubble Bath...and of course, Jack Chick tracts! Your equal-opportunity religious kitsch supplier.
posted by ChrisTN at 8:16 PM PST - 11 comments

Voice of a Superpower --Foreign Policy magazine puts together an interview with John & Jane Q. Public on us, the world, terror, and stuff--based on our responses to public-opinion polls from a wide variety of sources.
posted by amberglow at 7:15 PM PST - 5 comments

Bag Tag "We are sorry that our President is an idiot"
posted by alball at 6:57 PM PST - 36 comments

Rumsfeld fears U.S. losing long-term fight against terror. The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed "zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them. "It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference. Who are you and what have you done with Rumsfeld? And Can you do it some more? via the illustrious oliver willis.
posted by jonmc at 5:26 PM PST - 60 comments

Could this revolutionize architecture? A robot that can "print" a 2,000 sq-ft house in one day without the use of a single human hand. What sort of effects will this have on the future of houses?
posted by christian at 4:03 PM PST - 37 comments

Kick-off! With only five days to go to this year's main sports event (sorry, Athens!), it's time to get down to some serious preparation.
The excellent official Euro 2004 website has team news, video-on-demand, tournament history and - this is crucial - the official Euro 2004 spreadsheet. Because nothing beats a good "I told you so!"...
7 billion people worldwide is expected to tune in to the broadcasts from beautiful Cardoso-land. But if you won't have access to a tv, The Beeb is offering live audio commentary (and if your boss is cranky, The Guardian usually offers fast and witty SFW text-based play-by-plays). Vive o 2004!
posted by mr.marx at 3:17 PM PST - 23 comments

The BBC claims that Atlantis has been found.
"We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described"
posted by moonbird at 3:01 PM PST - 34 comments

Resonance Fine Art.
posted by Gyan at 12:01 PM PST - 3 comments

The Suicide’s Soliloquy August 25, 1838, the Sangamo Journal, a Whig newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, carried an unsigned poem, thirty-six lines long. It stands out for two reasons: first, its subject is suicide; second, its author was most likely a twenty-nine-year-old politician and lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin relates how historians regard a broken off engagement to Mary Todd as the trigger to his famous depression, but it was his perceived failure as politician, she maintains, that fed Lincoln's "black dog". (For his depression, Lincoln probably took "blue mass", a drug prescribed to treat "hypochondriasis," a vague term that included melancholia). Lincoln's medical history file is here
posted by matteo at 11:14 AM PST - 12 comments

Iraqis Paying 5 Cents a Gallon for Gas While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline — a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers
posted by Postroad at 11:04 AM PST - 47 comments

Another member of the Blank Generation lost. Robert Quine was found dead in his apartment in NYC yesterday, he committed suicide. He was sixty years old and had played with Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Lou Reed, Matthew Sweet, Lloyd Cole, Materia, Brian Eno and others, he also cut an LP with Jody Harris (Escape), and one with Fred Maher (Basic). It has been reported that he was suffering depression brought on by the death of his wife Alice last August. Robert also recorded the Velvet Underground on a hand held cassette deck, the highlights were issued last year as The Quine Tapes a three CD set. Personally, I'll always remember him from the jagged guitar parts from Richard Hell and Voidoids' "Blank Generation", which were the only guitar parts that I ever bothered to learn and faithfully reproduce note for note in the many times my band covered the song. Condolences to those that survive him.
posted by psmealey at 8:57 AM PST - 18 comments

ExBack.com is either a heartless scam or a course in Stalking 101...or both. Brian Caniglia, "Dating Coach and Author," promises to help you get back with your ex, "even if they don't want to talk to you." Right.
posted by serafinapekkala at 8:34 AM PST - 8 comments

The Long Reach of the Wolf
Wolves were returned to Yellowstone in 1995 after a 70 year absence (they were destroyed as menaces during the 20's). There are now 16 active packs in the park, and they have triggered a cascade of unanticipated changes in the park's ecosystem.
posted by Irontom at 7:09 AM PST - 24 comments

A New Breed of Zombie? Zombies have been a fixture in horror lore, inspiring people to write about the theory behind them, plans for national security against them, and home protection. But are these experts prepared for the mutations that have developed? Rock n Roll Zombies (see above), Viral Zombies, and Drug Induced Zombies.
posted by HellKatonWheelz at 6:45 AM PST - 9 comments

Keep your hands off! Warner Bros. distributes military-style night vision goggles to cinemas around Britain in order to scotch bootleg copies. "The staff have all been trained to use the glasses and are patrolling the cinema every 15 to 20 minutes." The company is determined to fight back after a deluge of poor-quality copies of the first two Harry Potter movies hit the black market.
posted by tcp at 5:30 AM PST - 44 comments

They Work For You was launched at yesterday's NotCon '04 by the people who brought you Fax Your MP. It makes Hansard accessible, via search facilities (by MP or by topic), with each individual speech presented as a separate, linkable entry. Get an RSS feed of your own MP's speeches, hold them to account over their special interests, but most of all, don't forget to vote this week!
posted by cbrody at 4:50 AM PST - 5 comments

Flashback: Margaret Thatcher writes about Ronald Reagan. President Reagan saw instinctively that pessimism itself was the disease and that the cure for pessimism is optimism. He set about restoring faith in the prospects of the American dream — a dream of boundless opportunity built on enterprise, individual effort, and personal generosity. He infused his own belief in America's economic future in the American people. That was farsighted. It carried America through the difficult early days of the 1981-82 recession, because people are prepared to put up with sacrifices if they know that those sacrifices are the foundations of future prosperity.
posted by David Dark at 3:33 AM PST - 56 comments

Hexa-Hexa-FlexaGon!
Why not waste some time with the other office supplies for a change?
posted by kaibutsu at 1:41 AM PST - 13 comments