MetaFilter

Fahrenheit 200,000,000 [Flash.] Celebrating the 59th anniversary of Hiroshima by making fission fun again!
posted by homunculus at 11:32 PM PST - 15 comments

The number 666 has been drawn by the Pennsylvania Lottery 12 times. Well, legally that is. On April 24, 1980, Pittsburgh personality Nick Perry, host of local TV shows and the live lottery drawing, fixed the lottery drawings. Perry has since passed away, but the story lived on in a (badly made) film adaptation. [more inside]
posted by ALongDecember at 10:41 PM PST - 8 comments

Wade Davis, on "Death and life in the Ethnosphere - The Naked Geography Of Hope" : "In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazon, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it....On an escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.....Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention." The death of the Ethnosphere was Margaret Meade's great concern up to her death, says Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis of Serpent and the Rainbow fame and student of Richard Evans Schultes, founder of Ethnobotany : "The surprising results obtained from treating psychoactive plants allowed their users to communicate more directly with the unseen world which they believed to exist." Davis coined the concept of the "Ethnosphere" and has worked for it's preservation through Cultural Survival
posted by troutfishing at 8:50 PM PST - 16 comments

"The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court is denied." Hours later, James Hubbard is injected with lethal chemicals and dies in Atmore, Alabama. Hubbard, convicted of a 1977 murder, was 74 years old, demented, and retarded. File this one under "it's not cruel and unusual if you don't know what's happening to you."
posted by PrinceValium at 8:25 PM PST - 54 comments

Oh Rob! What it was like to be in the studio audience of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Nice essay from Mark Evanier.
posted by braun_richard at 7:01 PM PST - 8 comments

Metal Quiz
posted by mr.marx at 2:34 PM PST - 21 comments

In 1967 the television program Bonanza enjoyed a three-year run as the most-watched television show in the United States. Bonanza had not started well; its first two seasons returning disapointing ratings but kept alive by the bequest of (then) NBC-parent RCA. RCA had a vested interest in keeping the color series alive in order to push sales of their color technology.

That same year Bill and Joyce Anderson created The Ponderosa Ranch tourist attraction near Incline Village, Nevada on the site allegedly shown by the burning map in the opening credits. The property annually attracts nearly 350,000 tourists to Lake Tahoe's north shore to enjoy the surroundings of a period recreation including mock gunfights, cowboy rope tricks and an honest 1860's-style saloon. (more inside)
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:53 AM PST - 12 comments

An OpEd piece by Bruce Springsteen, announcing the tour of Vote for Change, the umbrella of a new group including the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., the Dixie Chicks, Jurassic 5, James Taylor and Jackson Browne. (NYT)
posted by semmi at 9:51 AM PST - 71 comments

The worst CD in the world. Here's something to while away the office hours, compiling the worst CD in the world from tracks that you own.

"What's your least favourite track by your favourite band? It's a difficult question, because often we're reluctant to admit that our favourite bands have written bad songs. We program ourselves to take sides: we'll often convince ourselves that a good song by a band we don't generally like is worse than a bad song by a band we normally love.

I'm interested to know if there's any common stuff in people's most hated songs list, and conversely if something you own and hate happens to be someone else's favourite. And if there's something you really can't stand - why did you buy it? Why do you still have it?"

So it's fifteen tracks in your own record collection that you hate the most. And the site is something to do with some time mefi poster nylon, so all the more reason to join in the fun

I'm kicking off my CD with starship.
posted by ciderwoman at 9:44 AM PST - 148 comments

The recent Australia/US free trade deal,among many other things, extended copyright from fifty years after an authors death to seventy years. As a result stuff like this happening. via Making Light
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:37 AM PST - 12 comments

West Sunset - Photos of Lost Angeles. [some of you may not like that it's a flash site]
posted by dobbs at 8:29 AM PST - 11 comments

John Kerry's Official Naval Records Time to put to rest the nonsense coming out of the hate groups. And when you hear about the Swift Boat group who have put out an ad and now a book denouncing Kerry, then turn to this URL to find out about that group of patriots http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Swift_Boat_Veterans_for_Truth
posted by Postroad at 8:20 AM PST - 103 comments

A few months after his first (donated) statue, "Drinker", was kidnapped, London's guerrilla artist Banksy reveals a new statue, a £22,000 solid bronze prostitute with leather boots and a thong, dedicated "to thugs, to thieves, to bullies, to liars, to the corrupt, the arrogant and the stupid."
posted by shoepal at 8:17 AM PST - 25 comments

Forbidden Love: The Romance That Masqueraded as a Bio In early 2003, a Jordanian woman named Norma Khouri published a book entitled Forbidden Love (or Honor Lost in North America). This book was a memoir about how Norma Khouri's best friend, Dalia, was killed by her own father after she fell in love with a Christian military officer, and Norma's subsequent escape from Jordan. Forbidden Love was a bio that read like a sensational romance, and it sold 250,000 copies around the world and made Norma Khouri a celebrity in her adoptive country of Australia. However, it turns out that the book really was just a romance. Dalia never existed. Norma Khouri left Jordan at the age of 3 and grew to adulthood living in Chicago. So, one very disturbed woman has exploited Western prejudices about Arab cultures, fooled the general public, plunged her publisher into an enormous legal and financial embarrassment, and impugned the very real and serious problem of honour killings. And she got away with it for a full year and a half.
posted by orange swan at 7:08 AM PST - 14 comments

Cuba Classics: A Celebration of Vintage American Automobiles. An homage to Cuba's astonishing wealth of antique cars, revealing the time-worn splendor of classic American automobiles spanning eight decades.
posted by ZippityBuddha at 6:49 AM PST - 6 comments

The real center of power in the War on Terror: Katherine Harris. Officials in Indiana and Washington, D.C., said they are dumbfounded by a statement U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris made about a terrorist plot to blow up a power grid in Indiana. For those of you not familiar with Harris, she's certainly been no stranger to controversy over the years, and is not lacking for a significant fan base.
posted by psmealey at 6:15 AM PST - 24 comments

Well, it doesn't look like the Requiem for a Dream site ever got posted here. So, um, here it is.
Flash. You know, they were going to get Aronofsky to do Batman? Fell through when the executives woke up with a hangover, I assume.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 4:35 AM PST - 60 comments

...and some fun quirky news about Finnish conscripts.
posted by etc at 3:10 AM PST - 4 comments

Bored? Flame Wars got you down? Got extra Hardware? This guy has an idea what you can do with some of those old hard drives. Or maybe you would fancy a 3 D Display? And these guys have my favorite summer project of all. (Props to Boing Boing)
posted by jopreacher at 2:19 AM PST - 7 comments

At last, some fun quirky news about Israeli soldiers.
posted by Tlogmer at 2:04 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Doom 3: It may possibly be the most pirated game in history.
posted by Keyser Soze at 2:03 AM PST - 68 comments

The new batmobile in action
posted by Orange Goblin at 12:27 AM PST - 16 comments

Lather, rinse, repeat. "The forums are ablaze with vitriolic rage. Haters pan the device for being less powerful than a Cray X1 while zealots counter that it is both smaller and lighter than a Buick Regal. The virtual slap-fight goes on and on, until obscure technical nuances like,'Will it play multiplexed Ogg Vorbis streams?' become matters of life and death." Perhaps 1 Infinite Loop has an archetypical drama. [more q daily newsfilter]
posted by weston at 12:00 AM PST - 9 comments