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Do your windows overlook scenes of inspiration? Do you even have windows? Why not choose your view?
posted by sharpener at 10:23 PM PST - 23 comments

Tired of American politics? Want a diversion? Become a Sex Toy Tester. (Not safe for work, unless this is your work.)
posted by Wulfgar! at 4:57 PM PST - 19 comments

A Son's Goodbye
Pierre Elliott Trudeau was Canada's Prime Minister from 1968 - 1984. He was a flamboyant man who believed in one Canada and a strong federal government. His son Justin delivered this very touching eulogy at his funeral in 2000.
posted by Irontom at 3:34 PM PST - 8 comments

Jimmy Carter's Letter to Zell Miller via Boing Boing via Interesting People
A private correspondence between Jimmy Carter and Zell Miller has surfaced where Jimmy expresses his disappointment with Zell's taking part in the RNC and betraying his constituency.
posted by fenriq at 3:30 PM PST - 42 comments

Two Years Before the Mast. "In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor,before the mast, in the American merchant service. It is written out from a journal which I kept at the time, and from notes which I made of most of the events as they happened." At the beginning of his third year of Harvard a severe attack of measles interrupted Henry Dana's studies, and so affected his eyes as to preclude, for a time at least, all idea of study. The state of the family finances was not such as to permit of foreign travel in search of health. Accordingly, prompted by necessity and by a youthful love of adventure, he shipped as a common sailor in the brig, bound for the California coast.
posted by weston at 12:09 PM PST - 22 comments

Those of us following the daily heart attack that is electoral-vote.com will notice a new site feature today. If you've ever wondered how the popular vote can be so evenly split when the red state / blue state breakdown glares so overwhelmingly crimson, now you can see a map of the US with states inflated/shrunk according to the proportions of their electoral votes. Presumably, this map will be updated, along with the standard one, with new polling data daily. [thanks to EB for originally pointing me to the site]
posted by scarabic at 12:08 PM PST - 95 comments

The Starving Ocean : A large collection of articles by Debbie MacKenzie on the death of the ocean. The idea is that removing most of the fish from the sea might be sort of bad for the marine ecosystem as a whole. Her writing style is a bit kooky, but she has been right on some points (ie. the Grey Seal thing). Oh, and fishing is also responsible for the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
posted by sfenders at 11:49 AM PST - 10 comments

Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks tried to do Choose Your Own Adventure books one better with D&D-style rules. These massively single-player games, released in Britain, absorbed '80s nerds into the kind of murky, dead-serious fantasy recently parodied by Trogdor, in a decade when interactive fiction was on the rise. A bunch of the Gamebooks are now available to play online. Hang on to those healing potions.
posted by inksyndicate at 10:53 AM PST - 32 comments

Man says he was paid $150 for each chip laid The airstrikes on residential areas in Iraq are designed to lower support for militants by civilians, and create factional in-fighting. This raises two questions for me. Who are these 'scouts', to be trusted to identify legitimate targets? No monetary, revenge, tribal motivation? What are the legal implications of 'collateral damage'. Are innocent victims eligible for compensation? Any lawyers out there? If moral questions are not allowed under the patriot act, what about legal ones?
posted by dreeed at 10:30 AM PST - 8 comments

In China's newly wealthy cities, a research boom is starting. In parts of the countryside, the rivers are black and too toxic to touch.
posted by Tlogmer at 10:29 AM PST - 14 comments

Use one of those heavy U-locks to secure your bike? You might want to think again. It seems the barrel style lock mechanisms some of them employ can be opened by a Bic pen [.mov movie].
posted by normy at 9:44 AM PST - 69 comments

With our shipwrecked hearts. Ninety years ago Dino Campana, impoverished and outcast poet self-published his book Canti Orfici (.pdf file) ("Orphic Songs", mastefully translated into English by poet Charles Wright). The birth of the book wasn't marred only by Campana's mental illness (soon afterwards, he was committed to a mental institution). Initially, the "Orphic Songs" were submitted for possible publication to the poet/painter Ardengo Soffici, who promptly lost the manuscript. Campana spent the next six months reconstructing the book from memory. Finally in 1914, with the help of a local printer of religious tracts, he self-published a first edition of around 500, selling only 44. Campana attempted, with marginal success, to sell the remainder of his portion of the run (the printer had taken half the books as partial printing payment) himself at cafes in Florence. He is now remembered as one of Italy's greatest, most imaginative poets (with biographies ,award-winning movies about his troubled life and his dangerous, scandalous love affair with fellow writer Sibilla Aleramo. (more inside)
posted by matteo at 8:03 AM PST - 11 comments

Ever wanted to get away from the neighbours? Any neighbours? Phelps Dodge, a mining company, is selling off Kitsault, BC, a remote company town built in the early 80s to support a mine that later went bust.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:59 AM PST - 19 comments

Colin Powell in Four-letter Neo-con 'crazies' Row Perhaps Colin should have said they were cheney crazies.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:46 AM PST - 30 comments

Hurricane Risk for New Orleans: "if that Category Five Hurricane comes to New Orleans, 50,000 people could lose their lives. Now that is significantly larger than any estimates that we would have of individuals who might lose their lives from a terrorist attack. When you start to do that kind of calculus - and it's horrendous that you have to do that kind of calculus - it appears to those of us in emergency management, that the risk is much more real and much more significant, when you talk about hurricanes. I don't know that anybody, though, psychologically, has come to grip with that: that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone." (Nb. this excerpt from a fascinating 2002 American RadioWorks documentary does not refer specifically to Ivan.)
posted by sudama at 7:41 AM PST - 55 comments

Vladimir Putin, wanted, alive.
Chechen Rebels responding to the 10 million dollar bounty placed by the Russian secret services on rebel leaders Basayev and Mashkadov, have upped the ante offering 20 million dollars for the detention of "the war criminal Putin"...
This is the sort of war crimes they are referring to.
posted by talos at 3:57 AM PST - 89 comments

Livejournal - maybe not the first place you'd look for stunning Photo Blogs. So, here's 1st and 2nd, Aman Geld, M T Lancourt, The Inexplicable Brown Man, Nathan Blaney, Andrew Kendall and ????????????? to change your mind. (Coral links inside)
posted by triv at 3:01 AM PST - 10 comments

Sept. 7: Righteous indignation. Sept. 13: The million dollar question. Sept: 14: The beginning of the answer?
posted by Krrrlson at 1:40 AM PST - 39 comments