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England vs. USA Over the death penalty. Initially I felt like saying "butt out" but America tends to get involved in other countries when our citizens are in trouble (like that kid in Singapore way back).
posted by owillis at 11:23 PM PST - 7 comments

It's official, Jordan is back in the NBA. He's claiming it's for the love of the game, but I'm guessing maybe the book and the movie didn't do as well as he hoped? Do you think he'll pop back in and dominate the game, or have the Kobes and Iversons of the world passed him by?
posted by mathowie at 10:05 PM PST - 20 comments

Alex Ross talks to Radiohead's lead singer, Thom Yorke
posted by semmi at 8:22 PM PST - 6 comments

A-kickin' Femmes & the Men Who Love Them Female action heroes, a la Lara Croft, and the girls of Charlie's Angels, are wildly popular, while their male counterparts hit the skids. And men almost certainly make up a large part of the audience for the movies. Just a trend? Or deserving of an at-times overwrought analysis? Does Crouching Tiger . . . really fit here?
posted by raysmj at 7:08 PM PST - 9 comments

DC Government at work. (Warning, this is a hard story to read.) The government of the District of Columbia may be among the most incompetent and badly run in the US. Here's another example of its efficiency. DC does not have a constitutional right to home rule; that was granted to it by Congress. Is it time for Congress to revoke its charter and replace the entire governmental structure from the top to the bottom? (In the mean time, I'd like to see some criminal prosecutions of the people involved in this tragedy. No little girl should be treated this way. And I want to know what they're going to do to make sure this isn't still happening to other kids.)
posted by Steven Den Beste at 6:34 PM PST - 8 comments

Boy are the times a changin'. Kids and Parents disagree about music.

Nothing special about that.

But when your Dad is Bob Dylan, it makes the newspapers .
posted by BentPenguin at 5:20 PM PST - 15 comments

Bono, Fred Durst and P Diddy cover Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On". More Music From Hell news, even if the proceeds are for World AIDS Day and AIDs research."I just thought, you know, we're the usual suspects. Don't come to us. We're too right on," Bono said backstage at the VMAs. "Go raid the pop charts. Go ask Britney Spears. Go ask Jennifer Lopez. Go ask 'NSYNC. Go ask the rappers, the hip-hop guys like Ja Rule or Nelly or DMX...The Global AIDS Alliance originally asked Bono and Wyclef Jean to record the song; however, Bono had other ideas.
posted by BarneyFifesBullet at 4:51 PM PST - 10 comments

And the fans of Suck did rejoice with much rejoicing. Tim Cavanaugh writing for OJR in a hit-and-run-ish commentary of our old favorite CAPAlert and the impact--or lack thereof--of hoaxes online, Which raises a question: Who's smarter? The people who assume (correctly) that a wacky site is real or the ones who suspect (falsely but understandably) that it must be too odd to be real?
posted by th3ph17 at 4:42 PM PST - 6 comments

Carson Daly signs record deal. The VJ is getting his own record label in a deal with Sony. "I get so many tapes from great musicians," said Daly at the MTV Video Music Awards. "I usually give them away to friends, and then they become huge." Yeah, just what the music industry needs, the Daly Recording Corp.
posted by BarneyFifesBullet at 4:23 PM PST - 15 comments

Detonate.net rants on freelancing with eLance “The problems on eLance can be divided roughly into two groups. Jackoff buyers, and lowball sellers.” All I see are projects to build complete e-commerce sites or full intranets for $1,000. Does anyone have a positive experience using eLance? Is there a better online resource for freelancers to find work?
posted by kirkaracha at 4:10 PM PST - 10 comments

Ceiling-Fan Baseball is surely going to be one of the most popular sports to sweep the nation. Just don't play it in a room with any fine china sets ;)
posted by kingmissile at 2:09 PM PST - 13 comments

How this has not been posted at MeFi baffles me. No, not because it is a wonderful collaborative site that shares unique stories about NYC using a navigable map, but rather because I can't figure out where I found the link if it was not here(i searched, thoroughly). Also, as a petty sidenote, I wonder if they are willing to accept collaborative design submissions.....
posted by donkeysuck at 2:03 PM PST - 15 comments

Pages about the band Hot Snakes eventually led me to the site of record label Vagrant. I'm really impressed by the clean design and quality content. What other stand out record label sites are out there?
posted by gwint at 1:34 PM PST - 6 comments

Defend the beautiful Northwest from poachers and Californicators. Job perks include your own tinfoil hat!
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:02 PM PST - 3 comments

AOL may buy AT&T broadband in a deal that could allow them to own the browser, net access, data pipes, and content for a vast majority of internet usage and users. How far will AOL/TW go to control any and all forms of media? Are hearings to break the company up far off?
posted by mathowie at 12:47 PM PST - 14 comments

A vietnamese man, 95, sprouts new set of teeth. Are our bodies starting to adjust to longer life spans by replacing lost bits? Maybe we are developing redundant systems, like Klingons.
posted by o2b at 12:41 PM PST - 27 comments

These New Bumper Stickers will probably make you laugh out loud. I imagine that some of them would get your car keyed if you actually dared to put them on it. Then again, it would probably be worth getting your car keyed to see some people's reactions to these.
posted by kingmissile at 12:38 PM PST - 20 comments

"My name is John Johnson, I come from Wisconsin..." Find out the historical distribution of your last name throughout the U.S. (This will not, alas, be useful for Mr. Johnson, or the Smiths, Joneses, Williamses, and Browns of the world.) Brits, we haven't forgotten you! Of course, if you're doing genealogical research, you can turn to specific resources, like the US Census or the massive Familysearch.
posted by snarkout at 11:55 AM PST - 15 comments

Hail! Hail! The Gang's All Here! All this talk about 'circle jerking' lately - I figured, let's get back to basics. How arousing can waxing the flagpole be, semi-publically? Do people applaud successful launches, like a space-shuttle lift-off? Are there prizes for first and last place? If there were snacks, who could trust the cheese dip? I dunno. Human beings are spooky.
posted by Perigee at 10:45 AM PST - 21 comments

A man checks out copies of "Catcher in the Rye" to prevent teenagers from reading it.
posted by zedzebedia at 10:25 AM PST - 34 comments

If you like rabbits with random crap on their heads.... you'll love this site!

Oolong is so calm and patient -- he never gets angry when I take pictures of him. When I put various objects on his head, he stays still for a minute. This is just a result of an intimate relationship between me and Oolong. The main theme of my site is not to show these 'headperformance' links, and it's not my hope to propagandize nothing but the strangeness of his headperformance over the world.
posted by ignu at 8:32 AM PST - 26 comments

The new martial arts powerhouse in the world isn't China, and isn't Japan. It isn't in the Orient at all. It's Brazil.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 7:33 AM PST - 31 comments

Instant Design at the touch of a button More good news for designers -- not only has the ad market bottomed out, now this software from move design spits out instant layouts. Just add the text you want, choose the style, and hit Ctrl-G. The results are surprisingly tasteful. Is this the end of design as we know it, or just a toy for generating new ideas? Would you like fries with that?
posted by fellorwaspushed at 7:17 AM PST - 23 comments

Under eminent domain, a federal agency can "condemn" a piece of property and convert it to public use for the benefit of the greater community, while providing monetary compensation to the property owner. In Mississippi, however, officials at the state's economic development agency said they must seize (NYT link, login readit11, pass readit) 23 acres in the hands of African-American hold-outs to prove to Nissan that they can. What's especially interesting is that the local newspaper has pretty much ignored that aspect of the story in favor of covering the economic benefits. Is this a case of the rights of the few ceding to the rights of the many, or a case of a local government pushing people around because it can?
posted by headspace at 6:50 AM PST - 19 comments

Today in History What happened on your Birthday? Mine: July 8 Ferdinand Graf Von Zeppelin born in 1838 Wall Street Journal begins publishing 1889 Liberty Bell Cracks (again) 1835 Monty Irvin and Hank Thompson, first blacks to play for NY Giants (baseball)
posted by a3matrix at 6:29 AM PST - 21 comments

The American Institute of Graphic Arts offer a selection of useful symbols in eps and gif formats for free download. Are there any other sites offering similar symbols?
posted by ecvgi at 5:33 AM PST - 15 comments