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America's Most Literate Cities - A study authored by the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater looked at factors ranging from newspaper circulation to library and bookstore penetration within the 64 largest cities in the United States. His conclusion? Minneapolis is the most literate city in the country, directly followed by Seattle and Denver. San Francisco ranked fifth, Boston 13th, Chicago 45th and New York 47th.
posted by mrbula at 11:48 PM PST - 49 comments

Breaking up is hard to do. U.S. Senate intern sends an ill-advised email to a young woman he calls his "intellectual, moral, social, and emotional" inferior. Unclear if he sent it from his senate.gov address or not, but it quickly finds a wider audience. Here's the WashPost article mentioned on the Snopes page.
posted by GaelFC at 10:26 PM PST - 64 comments

Rumsfeld's personal spy ring The defense secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq. So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear. Today, Salon also looks into the role played by John Bolton. Is investigative journalism now just relegated to the web? [you have to look at an ad, I believe]
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 8:32 PM PST - 26 comments

Is the budget deficit going to be the other shoe that drops on the Bush administration? In the OMB's mid-session review [pdf], it admits the federal budget deficit would balloon to a record $455 billion this fiscal year after absorbing immediate costs from the war in Iraq, and then climb $20 billion higher in 2004. That's a 50% increase since the administration's last forecast five months ago. At least a few economists think even that number is underestimated. To top it off, the consequences of an increasingly large deficit and accompanying tax cuts are being passed on to the states. How's that for a neat twist on federalism?
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:25 PM PST - 9 comments

So What Went Wrong With Your Wedding? Any brawls? A drunken minister? The cake collapsed? The bride had the groom arrested? Was it a happy day?
posted by LeLiLo at 7:56 PM PST - 36 comments

China's Loch Ness Monster Returns Couldn't a SEAL team sort this out pretty quickly? Or one of those minisubs they use to find the Titanic? How do lake monsters manage to be so elusive? I mean, it's like there's anywhere for them to go! Unless, of course, they're lake monsters with legs. That's a whole other thing. In that case they could totally be hiding out in the next Chinese lake over.
posted by jengod at 7:19 PM PST - 9 comments

AOL Kills Netscape AOL "has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they’ve even pulled the logos off the buildings)." According to some former Netscape employees, "everybody in CPD is getting laid off." Meanwhile, Mozilla goes on at the new Mozilla Foundation. [via Zeldman]
posted by kirkaracha at 3:58 PM PST - 58 comments

"A Shoggoth on the Roof," a musical theater adaptation of HP Lovecraft's work, was set to be staged this fall by Chicago's Defiant Theatre, but the production has been scrapped due to legal threats by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, the creators of "Fiddler on the Roof".
posted by starkeffect at 3:37 PM PST - 22 comments

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players have been lauded by The New Yorker ("arguably the best-known local act of the new millennium"), Entertainment Weekly ("Okay, maybe it is a joke, but it's a very good one") and David Cross ("When I first saw them, I felt something that reminded me of the feeling you have when you’re, like, 11 or 12, and a not-unattractive girl tells another girl to tell you that she might think you’re cute.") This mom, dad and daughter play punk-rock anthems to slide show pictures they purchase at garage sales. And they're playing L.A. tomorrow!
posted by adrober at 3:21 PM PST - 15 comments

Night of the Johnstown Flood. "There was no larger news story in the latter nineteenth century after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The story of the Johnstown Flood has everything to interest the modern mind: a wealthy resort, an intense storm, an unfortunate failure of a dam, the destruction of a working class city, and an inspiring relief effort." Curious about about a line in this song, I went looking for information and found this story and this monument and the wonder/horror of this playground, where a giant force played with masses of iron, weighing scores of tons each, as a child might play with pebbles.
posted by weston at 3:10 PM PST - 23 comments

The wonderful online history journal Common-Place is presenting a special issue entitled "Early Cities of the Americas." Nineteen essays, each concerning a particular incident, person, place or encounter in the early life of a city, together provide a "worm's eye view" of what urban life was like in early postcolonial North and South America. Learn about vigilante justice and press sensationalism in 1856 San Francisco, or about a day in the life of a peasant family in Lima of the 1760s. Other essays concern the 17th-century "treasure city" of Havana, searching for salvation as a slave in 1647 New Amsterdam (New York), and capital punishment in colonial Paramaribo, Suriname. "Reading these essays cannot but help readers gain some historical perspective on the modern condition," especially as you see how many of the issues we associate with modern urban life (poverty, crime, bowling?) are not exactly recent developments.
posted by arco at 11:47 AM PST - 5 comments

In launching his 21-day "prayer offensive" directed at the Supreme Court, Pat Robertson asks his viewers to help him pray for three justices' death. "One justice is 83-years-old, another has cancer and another has a heart condition. Would it not be possible for God to put it in the minds of these three judges that the time has come to retire?"
posted by mathowie at 11:32 AM PST - 202 comments

What's on the menu? Perhaps fat and calories. "Five states have taken up similar bills this year, with none being passed so far." Will bills like these ever get passed? Will we ever see nutrition facts on fast food wrappers? Will consumers ever bother to read them?
posted by sharksandwich at 11:26 AM PST - 35 comments

spectacular attacks [note: flash]
posted by crunchland at 8:13 AM PST - 32 comments

Volvo SCC definitely provides some great new ideas - both innovative and practical for the near future (i.e., heartbeat sensor, adaptive headlights)
posted by adamms222 at 7:36 AM PST - 23 comments

The day the dinnertime phone calls stopped. We've previously discussed the new national do-not-call list on Mefi, but this Salon piece puts a new spin on the subject. Millions of rural Americans will inevitably lose telemarketing jobs because telemarketing will be regulated out of business. But the government isn't regulating them out of business, it is just providing a way for people to choose not to participate in this business scheme. The people who add their names to the list are the people who are going to hang up in the telelmarketer's face anyways, so where's the harm in this list? And what about the DMA's 10 reasons to protect the teleservices industry?
posted by archimago at 7:10 AM PST - 64 comments

The monstrous fauna of the cathedrals... although less polished than the prev. mentioned A Love of Monsters, this collection of gargoyle photographs - largely from British churches - more than makes amends with its enthusiasm for its subject.
posted by nthdegx at 5:27 AM PST - 6 comments

Cooked intel revolts spooks - Spooks revolt : elements of the US intelligence community are between outrage and open revolt, and Veterans for Intelligence Sanity, a group of ex - CIA professionals led by Ray McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the CIA who used to brief George Bush Sr., has called for Dick Cheney's resignation in an open letter to GW Bush, reports Nick Kristoff. "You may not realize the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA" they have warned Mr. Bush. At the heart of the matter is the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) under the leadership of Abram Shulsky. Meanwhile, "It's like, duh, the net doesn't forget. Get it?" : a blogger compiles a chronological list of Bush Administration statements on Iraq's WMD's - from "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." (George W. Bush Address to the Nation, March 17, 2003) to "They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer." (Donald Rumsfeld, Remarks to Council on Foreign Relations, May 27, 2003) and "U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction. (Condoleeza Rice, Reuters Interview, May 12, 2003) Also in above link: scroll to bottom for memorandum to GW Bush.
posted by troutfishing at 5:20 AM PST - 105 comments

I Can't Believe I Missed BlobFest 2003!
The annual celebration of the cheesy sci-fi movie that made Steve McQueen a movie star and the town of Phoenixville, PA proud was last weekend... But even if you weren't there you can still...
» Meet The Man Who Owns The Blob and giggle when you learn just what it's made of.
» Read the liner notes from the Criterion laserdisc (yes, there was one).
» Listen to that awful theme song (written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David).
» Be shocked that the basement window that our heroes used to escape in the movie is now blocked by a wheelchair ramp!
» Or buy a ticket to the newly-restored historic Colonial Theatre, just so you can run out of it, screaming. They won't mind.
posted by wendell at 1:28 AM PST - 10 comments

Drifiting towards war - "I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous." - Fmr Defense Secretary William Perry
posted by jdaura at 1:06 AM PST - 20 comments

JCM Artistamp Gallery. More at the Jas Cyberspace Museum. Don't miss bugpost.
posted by plep at 12:29 AM PST - 3 comments