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"... Everyone needs an escape. It just amazes me that for 1,200 people this involves sitting in darkened rooms listening to presentations on Harry Potter and the Sanctity of Everyday Life: JK Rowling's Complex Treatment of the Trope of Normalcy." Carole Cadwalladr covers Lumos 2006 for the Guardian. [via]
posted by anjamu at 10:24 PM PST - 27 comments

POD-dy Mouth - a blog reviewing the best of print-on-demand (self-published) books: "finding needles, discarding hay". Also with commentary on the industry itself, and great snark (1, 2). Take her quiz: can you spot the POD excerpts from the traditionally published? (Answers here.)
posted by Melinika at 8:56 PM PST - 9 comments

Are smart people grumpier?
posted by footnote at 8:54 PM PST - 48 comments

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:50 PM PST - 35 comments

Homophobia, bad 'fan' art and childish humor abound at Craig Not Bond, which is campaigning for a boycott of the new Bond film Casino Royale. Why? Because Bond is clearly not a sissy blonde fag who can't drive a stick. A painful excursion down to the innermost (and utterly painful) depths of pissed off fandom.
posted by Effigy2000 at 8:46 PM PST - 83 comments

I found a site with hundreds of old TV theme songs. It’s not much to look at, and the audio ain’t the best, but it’s free (and apparently maintained by a patriotic american, thank you, sir). Spending some hours there reminded me that composers and musicians used to take the craft seriously. You can find just about anything. Good? The Avengers, Barney Miller, Green Hornet, Hawaii Five-O, Rockford Files, Room 222. Feelgood? The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Cheese? Dynasty, Three’s Company, Flo. 80s schlock? Hardcastle & McCormick, Hunter. Check out the mess that is the theme for The Bionic Woman. Did you remember that Jose Feliciano did Chico and the Man? I bet you didn't know...well...WTF: The Associates. I wondered where the tradition went, but, then, after MTV, I guess all the media became one and ‘TV’ ‘Theme’ ‘Music’ became something like this. My favorite theme? I had to go elsewhere to find it: it’s my own.
posted by toma at 8:37 PM PST - 58 comments

This is what we all hoped the internet would be about. When we discovered the internet, most of us saw it as a way to connect to other people. Peter has only been on youtube for a week. His first video has been viewed nearly 300,000 times, and there isn't a single idiot teenager within range of the camera. Do you have a few minutes to spare? Spend them with Peter. Six videos, and hopefully, more to come.
posted by HuronBob at 6:13 PM PST - 86 comments

Moldovan wine was famous throughout the former Soviet Union. The centerpiece of its industry was (and is) a huge network of caverns known as Cricova where Stalin supposedly stored the remnants of Goering’s wine collection. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought extreme economic hardship to Moldova. In the midst of this hardship, the Russian Government imposed a ban on Moldovan (and Georgian) wines and cut off access to their largest export market. You might want to consider their plight if you visit the liquor store this weekend.
posted by jason's_planet at 5:39 PM PST - 11 comments

Fascination with ground and figure carries on in various fields after The Rubin vase / face Illusion, M.C. Escher, and Marshall McLuhan. Besides being extremely important in the fields of photography and poetry, the figure/ground relationship is important to physicist Paul Davies, who says "the true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life." Also, Peter Grundy and Yiang Yan discuss how contextual ground relates to linguistic figure in Bill Clinton's famous apology, Andrew Graydon plays with the distinction between sound as environment and sound as music, and W.C. Richardson creates paintings in which "positive and negative spaces seem unstable; figure becomes ground, ground becomes figure."
posted by Aghast. at 5:33 PM PST - 3 comments

Darth Vader Owns his Wife (You Tube)
posted by Turtles all the way down at 3:39 PM PST - 64 comments

He describes how the birds’ wings flutter, the small black eyes blink, and the head pops off in your palm... A riveting inside look at the Exotic Animal Training program at Moorpark College, which offers America's only college degree in animal training.
posted by By The Grace of God at 3:29 PM PST - 15 comments

Media-opoly from Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse skit created by Robert Smigel broadcast in 1998 on NBC, a subsidiary of GE. Not broadcast since, apparently.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 2:35 PM PST - 25 comments

Eat your vegetables, they are good for you. the goal ... it seemed so ambitious at the time! ... was to cook a vegetable, with new recipes and new vegetables, every single day for an entire month. (Why? Because our diets need more vegetables. Because vegetables are too often an after-thought. And because it's easy to get stuck in a veggie rut.) But after a month, it felt like I was just getting started ... and the asparagus was calling. And then ... 365 days of new vegetables and new recipes.
posted by caddis at 1:49 PM PST - 13 comments

To work around the proprietary whims of digital audio software developers and laptop processor limitations during the mid- and late-1990s, a small band of technically-minded people, including the electronic musician Blitter, pulled together in the late 1990s to engineer the open-source OPEN DSP EZ-Kit platform, a 16-bit computer designed entirely with a focus on low cost and extensible control and DSP arithmetic capabilities. While this project and similar commercial offerings never seemed to gain the critical mass needed to sustain long-term interest, perhaps the new Arduino hardware project from MIT's Processing hardware group may gain a foothold with Processing and Pure Data audio software hobbyists and artists alike, allowing the creative community to extend, enhance and share inventive uses of new technology. Arduino's use has already begun in fascinating museum installations around the world, and has become a part of this year's SONAR and Ars Electronica festivals.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:06 PM PST - 10 comments

The annual Perseid meteor shower will peak in intensity tonight. The product of Earth intersecting with the debris trail from Comet Swift-Tuttle, the shower should be most dramatic shortly before dawn. More information on the shower can be found in various places.

Those living far away from cities will have the best view, but there are lots of good photos from past showers online for those immersed in city light, or blanketed under cloud.
posted by sindark at 12:59 PM PST - 18 comments

American Journal of Cardiology reports that extensive use of marijuana doesn't hurt your cardiovascular system. Remember it also doesn't increase your risk of lung cancer. Previous MeFi
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 12:18 PM PST - 69 comments

The tabla is the most popular and widely used drum of North India. Origins (embedded sound and mp3) of the tabla and tabla bols, the fascinating spoken sounds of the percussive beat. [more]
posted by nickyskye at 11:55 AM PST - 19 comments

Truth In Advertising - Hilarious video.
posted by forwebsites at 10:52 AM PST - 30 comments

Fred the Undercover Cat dead at 15 months.
posted by rxrfrx at 10:07 AM PST - 31 comments

Journal of Mythic Arts - an online journal for the exploration of myth, folklore, and fairy tales, and their use in contemporary art. A smattering from the archives: Shape-Shifters; Old Wives' Tales; Wolf's Heart.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:05 AM PST - 10 comments

Medical Illustrations.
posted by econous at 7:05 AM PST - 15 comments

Friday flash fun, a day late. The National Gallery of Art has some awesome Flash apps intended for kids, but lots of fun for adults. My favorites: Flow, PixelFace, Mobile.
posted by cerebus19 at 6:19 AM PST - 8 comments

Winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, a peace activist who opposed reunification for fear Germany might once again war against its neighbors, ghost-writer of Willy Brandt's speeches, author of the great fabulist history of World War II and postwar Germany, The Tin Drum, and of My Century, a novel of one hundred chapters, one for each year of the last century, a man considered part of the artistic movement known in German as "Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung" or "coming to terms with the past", Günter Grass belatedly admits the history he expunged from his personal narrative: his service as a member of the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg of the Waffen-SS. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Grass explained his service would stain him forever, but that only after the war did he feel ashamed of having been in the Waffen-SS:

for me, because I am sure of my recollection, the Waffen SS was nothing frightful, but rather an elite unit that they sent where things were hot, and which, as people said about it, had the heaviest losses.

posted by orthogonality at 5:46 AM PST - 46 comments

Abdul Mati Klarwein is the the thoughtful guy who painted the wonderous gatefold sleeves of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, and Santana's Santana's Abraxas. It's all the more inspiring to be listening to either musician's music of the period while viewing. Just don't stare too long. [ last two YouTube]
posted by eegphalanges at 5:10 AM PST - 12 comments

You are the stock of the corporation known as the U.S.A. Following the recent discussion of a Jordan Maxwell video, colourfully dismissed as "new age sewage", I thought Mefites would like (and/or rather, I would like Mefites) to apply their knowledge and insight to a far more topical example of Mr. Maxwell's work. A jumping off point: The law administered in the courts is maritime law. (Google video @ 1 Hr)
posted by Tarn at 3:10 AM PST - 15 comments

Richard Holbrooke delivers an analysis and forecast of how the current situation could trigger a chain reaction that would lead to world war. He refers to Barbara Tuchmans Guns of August, apparently a political science classic, that has been mentioned here on mefi. Here's the article in dutch with an appropriate picture of the murder of archduke Franz Ferdinand.
posted by jouke at 2:39 AM PST - 22 comments

John Murtari hunger strike protest. John Murtari has been on a hunger strike after being jailed without a jury trail. A PHD in aeronautics, Murtari lost his job and took a lower paying job at an ISP. Unable to pay the extremely high child support payment, he asked the courts to re-adjust his payment. The court denied him. The judge offered him probation or 6 months jail time. Murtari chose jail time with protest. Murtari stated Even Terrorists get a trail by jury. He is finally on a feeding tube, forced down his nose, after loosing 28 lbs. Update with protest photos and his comments on the protest.
posted by IronWolve at 12:46 AM PST - 60 comments

Fans of the BBC version of The Office take note: in 2006, Microsoft hired Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant to make a pair of faux training videos for the UK Microsoft headquarters, with Gervais reprising his David Brent role. Both videos are now up on iFilm, and are pretty damn funny (if you're amused by the Brent schtick, which I am).
posted by lilbrudder at 12:12 AM PST - 15 comments