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MiHail of the portabella mushroom fame died in February while waiting for what would have been her third liver transplant. She will always be with me in my soul. Rest in peace, Cathy.
posted by Jade5454 at 6:19 PM - 141 comments

Roy D. Mercer asks Bill Goldberg if he's ready for an ass whoopin.[more inside]
posted by bigmusic at 5:25 PM - 18 comments

When a runaway train crashed through the floor in Washington, DC's Union Station back in January 1953, the Pennsylvania Railroad immediately started to cover it up. But this coverup was in all the newspapers: the railroad just built a temporary floor over a locomotive and two railroad cars, because of all the traffic for Eisenhower's inauguration. A few weeks later, the locomotive was retrieved, repaired, and running again, like nothing had ever happened. Another page includes some pictures (scroll down).
posted by Godbert at 4:58 PM - 14 comments

Chris Tucker has become the highest-paid actor in Hollywood for agreeing to star in the third installment in the Rush Hour film series. Apparently he's already prepping for the car chases. No word on whether not he got those editing rights he was asking for last year.
posted by ktoad at 4:23 PM - 44 comments

Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man. Direct Google Video link to a fruitcake-tastic half-hour film of "a symposium held at Boston University on November 20, 1972 that explores the implications of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life within the galaxy and the universe. " Well worth scrubbing through for some good moments if you don't have time to watch the whole thing. Other cool old NASA videos on google video include Who's Out There?, starring a cigar smoking Orson Welles squinting a lot and reading off the cue cards, and Debrief: Apollo 8: "Happiness is bacon squares for breakfast".
posted by 6am at 3:49 PM - 7 comments

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson told an audience that he'd cancelled a loan because "a minority businessman" didn't like the President. He later claimed to have been joking. [via]
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:40 PM - 21 comments

Meet the grolar bear (via)
posted by reklaw at 3:30 PM - 38 comments

Renegade wild hogs captured using dogs and bare hands. Greg Whidden captures the hogs from a nature preserve where they're causing environmental damage.
posted by exogenous at 1:46 PM - 16 comments

Priest convicted in 1980 nun-slaying. The 71-year-old nun was found on Good Saturday 1980 strangled to death, stabbed 27-32 times, wrapped in an altar cloth with her under-garments around her ankle. Abuse victim Jane Doe re-opens 1980 case with account of childhood Satanic ritual abuse. Was there a cover up by the diocese?
posted by Marnie at 12:53 PM - 40 comments

Battle Cry, the youth arm of the Christian Reconstructionist (also called Dominionist) movement, is holding a rally in Philadelphia this weekend. They've already had events in San Francisco & Detroit. Create your own Battle Plan or just chat with other soldiers in God's Army. But not everyone is happy about it.
posted by scalefree at 12:10 PM - 120 comments

Margaret Thatcher Dot Org. For all your Margaret Thatcher related needs.
posted by sgt.serenity at 11:15 AM - 39 comments

CIA Secret Prisons Exposed The disappeared: Are they dead? Are they alive? Ask Congress. Ask the president.
posted by Postroad at 10:30 AM - 39 comments

I didn't believe my eyes, but it turns out that it only takes some cold water and a thermal inversion to make a superior mirage (superior in both position and awesomeness). Pekka Parviainen has written about the phenomenon in Finland and has lots of photos to share. Still don't believe? Watch the videos: especially the one in which the mirage disappears before your very eyes! (.rm)
posted by imposster at 9:38 AM - 23 comments

Just when you thought we'd run out of things to sue over. A man who was denied a red nylon tote bag during a Mother's Day promotion at an Angels baseball game has filed a sex and age discrimination lawsuit against the team.
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 9:22 AM - 36 comments

Allen, 24, and Brandon Day, 28, of Dallas, were in Southern California for a financial convention. They got lost Saturday west of Palm Springs after wandering off a trail during what was supposed to be a day hike. [On the third day] they discovered a campsite in a dead-end gorge. Day and Allen were elated, thinking someone there could help them find the way out. But something was wrong. A radio and flashlight were corroded. They realized the place was deserted. ``His last journal entry was one year ago to the day that we found it, which was very eerie,' Day said. ``Nobody knew where he was, nobody knew to come looking for him, so he was preparing for the end. We were looking at the words of a man who was passing.' The missing man was John Donovan, who had disapeared a year earlier while hiking the pacific crest trail. "Even in his death, he was helping people," Donovan's longtime friend, Chris Hook, said from Richmond, Virginia.
posted by 445supermag at 9:12 AM - 26 comments

Killing the CIA. A startling and important look at the recent dismantling of the CIA by the Bush Administration.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 8:48 AM - 26 comments

After 12 weeks, viewers of the UK version of "The Apprentice" saw Michelle Dewberry beat off Ruth Badger to win a £100,000 a year job working for Sir Alan Sugar. Inspired by the show, some organisations are leaning towards this style of hiring for their own recruitment. Not surprisingly, others are dismayed.
posted by mr_silver at 6:09 AM - 32 comments

New security glitch found in Diebold system California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to "sequester" their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with "trusted" software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.
posted by leapingsheep at 5:15 AM - 104 comments

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls. "The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks"
posted by gsb at 4:55 AM - 182 comments

You have all dropped your MySpace profiles and jumped to AIM Pages, haven't you? [via]
posted by tellurian at 11:09 PM - 48 comments

Have your war and heat it too? As the war approaches the $350 billion mark, Cass Sunstein notes: "For the United States, the economic burden of the Iraq war is on the verge of exceeding the total anticipated burden of the Kyoto Protocol." Costs may rise as high as $10 trillion. At least we know it wasn't about oil: in a good year, Iraq makes about $14 billion on fossil fuels. (via)
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:06 PM - 28 comments

The odd films of Neural Surfer. I've yet to watch them all but my fave so far is Little Things that Jiggle: Richard Feynman and Atomic Physics {google vid}, which is part of the Philosophy in less than five minutes (sometimes) series.
posted by dobbs at 8:34 PM - 10 comments

John Birch Society Member calls for a Rebel Alliance in this fascinating article on those opinions jointly shared by both conservatives and liberals. I didn't expect to read this from someone I consider so far to the right.
posted by jfrancis at 7:47 PM - 33 comments

Funny Stuff. Laughing usually doesn't hurt but even when it does it can help you stay healthy and happy too! Other than the obvious *ahem*, is there anything the internet is better for than laughing yourself into a coughing fit? If you like jokes, or puns (that one is awesome - by the way), or people setting their faces on fire (my personal favorites), it's all out there.
posted by twjordan at 7:37 PM - 11 comments

Another black eye for ID (youtube link): Zoologist Dan-Eric Nilsson of the University of Lund in Sweden explains how the complex human eye could have evolved gradually from a primitive light-sensitive eye-spot. Via Swift.
posted by flabdablet at 7:17 PM - 50 comments

Writing has been around for a long time, but that doesn't mean we've mastered it yet. Want to make fiction? Perhaps it makes itself, perhaps it makes you... Self reference breeding infinite hyperrealities. Which world will you choose?
posted by 0bvious at 6:27 PM - 9 comments

"But What About Us? Student Photographs from the Corridor of Shame" is a traveling photography exhibit that follows up on “Corridor of Shame: the neglect of South Carolina's rural schools" [wmv], a 58 minute documentary that tells the story of the challenges faced in funding an adequate education in South Carolina's rural school districts. The documentary tracks the evidence presented on behalf of eight school districts in Abbeville County School District v. The State of South Carolina [pdf]. The exhibit is a powerful demonstration to the needs still unmet in South Carolina's rural schools. Only five pictures and captions are on the website now, but most of the pictures appear inside with permission from the copyright holder.
posted by ND¢ at 6:12 PM - 28 comments

Google Trends is really cool. Yes, it's yet another google project, but you can compare so much pointless stuff with it!
posted by blacklite at 6:03 PM - 122 comments

Hungry like the wolf. In his state-of-the-nation address, Vladamir Putin took a swipe at the Bush administration, saying that Russia should build "a strong, reliable home because we do see what's going on in the world. . . Comrade Wolf knows whom to eat. It's eating without listening to anyone. And by all appearances, it's not going to listen . . . Where is all this pathos about the need to fight for human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests? Here everything is possible. There are no limits."
posted by insomnia_lj at 4:01 PM - 25 comments

Order from chaos! Fill a cylindrical bucket with water and make it so the bottom can spin. At certain speeds, stable regular polygonal shapes will spontaneously form at the turbulent surface of the water. See the video. [2.6MB avi] [via last week's PRL]
posted by sergeant sandwich at 3:14 PM - 28 comments

Super Mario Galaxy
posted by reklaw at 2:35 PM - 59 comments

No More Black and White. An article in the Washington Post about a census report released today shows that 45 percent of children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, with Hispanics the largest group. Interestingly enough, as Andrew Sullivan notes, among the under-5 population only 4% are black, a trend he's seen in the time he's lived in Washington D.C. ("It's only gotten whiter and browner.") This has happened/is happening perhaps most dramatically in New Orleans (previously).
posted by fugitivefromchaingang at 2:30 PM - 40 comments

The Little Bird Flies Away animation short by Veronica Ibarra. also, the Cooking Set.
posted by trishthedish at 1:05 PM - 10 comments

The Magical Number Seven Psychologist George A. Miller on the human limits for processing and remembering data. It is a little dramatic to watch a person memorize 40 binary digits in a row without error.
posted by Lanark at 11:37 AM - 14 comments

Luttig Resigns. Judge J. Michael Luttig, long considered a front-runner for a Supreme Court nomination, at least until he was passed over by President Bush, has resigned his position on the Fourth circuit. Luttig will take over as general counsel to Boeing. Read Boeing's press release and Luttig's resignation letter [pdf].
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:28 AM - 29 comments

Gum Blondes Celebrity portraits done in chewed gum. By artist Jason Kronenwald.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 8:46 AM - 31 comments

George Bataille's Documents—a short-lived but influential journal conceived as a 'war machine against received ideas'—has inspired an exhibition, Undercover Surrealism (Flash with sound).
posted by jack_mo at 5:32 AM - 8 comments

Living without Numbers or Time...
The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists. [via aldaily.com]
posted by moonbird at 4:27 AM - 43 comments

British supermarket giant Tesco recently posted profits of £2m ($3.73bn), like most modern employers it decided to reward its employees for their hard work: by giving them a free meal in the staff canteen worth £1.40 ($2.60). Others were offered sausage rolls and tuna sandwhiches. Does this make Tesco the most tightfisted corporation of all time? Or are their others equally parsimonious? Or even worse?
posted by MrMerlot at 2:04 AM - 64 comments

Spinner Disk A flash site with Einstein, penguins, ninjas, narwhals and a dinosaur. What more could one want?
posted by Serial Killer Slumber Party at 1:12 AM - 20 comments

Study shows that just handling a gun increases testosterone levels in men.
posted by 445supermag at 8:45 PM - 62 comments

Brian Eno is the godfather of electronica, the inventor of ambient music, and producer of the best work by bands like the Talking Heads and U2. Tchad Blake has helmed the mixing board for Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Soul Coughing and the Bad Plus, to name just a few. Paul Simon is one of the most recognized names in pop music both for his work with Art Garfunkel and for his fusion of American pop music with African and South American music. Surprise is the the album they collaborated on, the new Paul Simon record featuring Eno's signature sonic landscapes all over it, and the entire lovely thing, complete with liner notes, is available to listen to on Simon's website.
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:43 PM - 69 comments

"The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an anti-child mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception." Don't even mention the mind-set behind a vaccine for HPV.
posted by missbossy at 7:01 PM - 1194 comments

In nature, mothers aren't so motherly.
posted by Citizen Premier at 5:51 PM - 21 comments

Is Stephen Merritt a racist? Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker's Pop Critic and maybe the finest music critic writing today, has long been an activist against rockism. Stephen Merritt, the gay, white auteur behind such postmodern pop experiments as 69 Love Songs, and sometime target of S/FJ's ire, recently got into hot water with Jessica Hopper, among others, for allegedly racist comments made at the EMP Pop Music Conference, which is Christmas and Halloween all rolled into one for music crits and their fellow nerds. Slate's John Cook defends Merritt, claiming that disliking rap doesn't necessarily make one a racist, and S/FJ responds with some further thoughts. But was Frere-Jones accusing Merritt of racism, specifically, or simply of wack unexamined biases? And is that a fair criticism? Slate's readers don't seem to think so.
posted by maxreax at 4:53 PM - 174 comments

A nice mixed bag of live mp3s.
posted by dobbs at 4:08 PM - 18 comments

Yesterday, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote a letter to the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush. Here it is. (Courtesy Le Monde, 8 page PDF, English.) The letter has been "dismissed by its recipients as a rambling philosophical treatise." (Times) Further coverage at NYT and Le Monde (French). The letter ends 27 years of diplomatic silence.
posted by blacklite at 3:58 PM - 94 comments

A meth bust turned deeply odd in East Palo Alto, California when an underground hospital clinic was discovered in a drug raid on a house owned by a Stanford Hospital employee. The world of underground medicine has been memorably fictionalized in film, but it can be argued that [nytfilter: metabooty/bootytastic] the real thing is plenty bizarre (link possibly NSFW) on its own merits.

On the other hand, what constitutes underground medicine? You can go with the literal definition, or you can consider this recent near-miss with one of the most persistent urban legends. However, as is often the case, the most entertainingly impassioned defenses of "underground medicine" are those promulgated by "alternative health" practitioners (mustache possibly NSFW).
posted by scrump at 3:17 PM - 12 comments

Newspaper Snippet Generator
posted by crunchland at 2:07 PM - 17 comments

[419Filter] The Perfect Mark: After losing thousands and being sentenced to prison, John Worley is still convinced the Nigerian governmental officials and their fortune exist.
posted by mowglisambo at 2:02 PM - 50 comments