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Watermelon carving - a gallery of intricate work and eclectic subjects. In Thailand, there is a tradition of elaborately carving fruit and vegetables, especially when preparing foods for royalty or as part of festivals such as Loi Krathong. This gallery offers some pictorial instructions; books, tools, and sample instructions are also available from the Temple of Thai.
posted by madamjujujive at 10:56 PM PST - 15 comments

Echelon is a Mac application that, if you try to register it with a pirated serial number, will delete your entire home directory. (Windows users: This is a very, very bad thing, second only to wiping the entire drive.) Is this a good way to fight piracy, and can it even be legal?
posted by jjg at 10:42 PM PST - 42 comments

ever miss the feel of a big plastic reciver. I guess these guys did.
posted by delmoi at 10:15 PM PST - 18 comments

All samples must now be licenced according to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, including tiny samples that have been modified to the point of being unrecognisable. "We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way." via /dev/null
posted by Jimbob at 9:26 PM PST - 40 comments

This has a value in our profession, and it doesn't have to do with scale at all. It has to do with the actual meaning of a house.
posted by alms at 9:18 PM PST - 8 comments

Just One Question... "How many times have you been arrested, Mr. President?"
$1002.21 Bounty to the first person to ask George W. Bush this question in a public forum. [PayPal donations accepted to increase the bounty]
posted by lagado at 8:16 PM PST - 42 comments

Powell declares a genocide in Darfour, marking a turnaround in America's appraisal of the situation in Sudan. Will something finally be done? And is Powell off the ranch on this, or this actually the policy of the Bush administration? Previously discussed in a number of threads.
posted by hank_14 at 8:11 PM PST - 23 comments

Fiction Bitch "The Fiction Bitch doesn't want to encourage new writers. She wants to weed out terrible writers before they go on to bore millions of innocent publishing house interns to tears."
posted by dobbs at 2:11 PM PST - 48 comments

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
posted by Mwongozi at 1:47 PM PST - 18 comments

Life After Death. A look at the legacy of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by al Qaeda three years ago today. It was in the first issue of SixBillion.org, an online magazine of narrative journalism. [Via WorldChanging.]
posted by homunculus at 1:01 PM PST - 4 comments

Ken Jennings, why have you forsaken me? Mr. Kottke, best known for breaking the Teacup Dome scandal, is now reporting that Ken Jennings has lost his 75th game. For the record today he will play his 42nd game, so he still has a long way to go. Perhaps most interesting is that the AP, etc. are all picking up on this but not giving direct credit to Kottke -- as seen in this Slashdot thread.
posted by geoff. at 12:52 PM PST - 48 comments

The grim glory of war. Hundreds of pictures from the front lines in Iraq. I was very skeptical about posting this link, but I thought it'd be useful to all our sofa warriors here at MeFi, so they'll have some images to relate to whenever they equate "support our troops" with "keep them there for as long as it takes".
posted by acrobat at 4:56 AM PST - 40 comments

This is Jon's diary. Jon is in prison on money laundering and drugs charges. "My new co-habitants are enduring the twin evils of a broken swamp-cooler and a cockroach infestation. A neighbouring asthmatic inmate happily described how he inhaled a cockroach that had crept into his nebulizer. He could feel the insect crawling around inside him and promptly vomited his stomach contents. Unfortunately the cockroach was not ejected, as it was lodged in his lung."
posted by urban greeting at 2:44 AM PST - 13 comments

Why no Pliestocene Park? "Everyone seems to assume that the primeval condition of the Great Plains was bison and prairie dog, with the occasional pronghorn herd, but no other large mammals. Yet for 1.65 million years, North America teemed with large animals: the 'pleistocene megafauna.' Then as the last ice age was ending and the first humans were coming over from Siberia, most of them died out." Sad -- doesn't everybody want a pony?
posted by namespan at 12:06 AM PST - 15 comments

CNN reports that Jakarta has been bombed. Here's the explosion cloud rising. Here's a shot of Plaza 89 after the explosion, and here's another from a different perspective. Has flickr beaten textamerica in the race to beat CNN? Are ma_girl and fauzanazmi so different that they must use moblog services to suit their personalities or is it something else? How much specialization and differentation can we expect in the moblog arena? Will there be moblog streams of current events like this bombing in Jakarta? Will tagging suffice for such a task? Or is this just another terrorist bombing in Jakarta, I'm up late, and found a photo from a bombing before the story even broke on any of the major news sites? Ennui.
posted by filchyboy at 12:02 AM PST - 52 comments