MetaFilter

Ken Bigley murdered by Iraqi terrorists. The third of his group to be beheaded, his ordeal lasted three weeks, whilst his kidnappers demanded that the British release prisoners they didn't even hold. The poor man did not deserve this.
comment posted at 12:46 AM on Oct-9-04

Politics in the 'New Normal' America. By Joan Didion.
comment posted at 10:40 PM on Oct-7-04

Terrorists strike tourists in Egypt...again. At least 30 people have been killed, 114 injured today when a truck bomb blew up the Hilton hotel in Taba, Egypt, a resort town in the Sinai. A concurrent explosion occurred nearby in Nuweiba, Egypt, and early casualty reports there are 4 dead, 40 wounded. The apparent target? The many Israeli families who were vacationing in the area, celebrating Simchas Torah. The less-apparent target? The $4 billion/year 7 million people/year Egyptian tourism industry, a crucial part of that country's economy. While this is not the first time that tourists from Israel have been singled out worldwide, it's also part of a decade-long pattern of mass-casualty terrorist attacks against tourists from multiple countries within Egypt. Keeping in mind that one of the most devastating economic after-effects of 9/11 was the blow it dealt to air travel and tourism worldwide, not to mention close calls and tragic events at famed tourist destinations, is tourism-terrorism going to become the wave of the future?
comment posted at 11:58 PM on Oct-7-04

these tombstones looked really neat. Moocow's photos show what life is like on the ground in Iraq as a US liberator in the air force. It's always great to see an insider's view, but I must admit some of the captions come off as a bit weird/disrespectful. Otherwise, interesting stuff you don't see everyday.
comment posted at 6:09 PM on Oct-7-04
comment posted at 6:13 PM on Oct-7-04
comment posted at 6:24 PM on Oct-7-04

The summer of Republican discontent. The sudden decline and eventual fall of the GOP.
comment posted at 6:16 PM on Oct-7-04

I'm not much for the tin foil hat types out there, but does anyone else find it odd that the leader of the Islamic Jihad was killed [Reuters UK via Fark] and it's not being reported by anyone else? Could it have anything to do with the fact that it's nearing election time and the fact that it wasn't us who did it?
comment posted at 5:32 PM on Oct-6-04

Obligatory post-debate thread. Who do you think won? Why? Do the VP debates matter?
comment posted at 4:52 PM on Oct-6-04

best of luck, ev. after over five years of sweat and tears, founder evan williams decides to hang up the reigns on his position at blogger. undoubtedly, he's done a lot for the blogging community and the internet in general.. we wish him well.
comment posted at 11:41 PM on Oct-4-04

Bush Remixed It almost reminds me of an early Steve Reich. Kinda hypnotic.
comment posted at 4:06 PM on Oct-4-04

Screenhead: Funny web shit curated by Dong Resin. Also Jalopnik, concerning cars, and Kotaku, for gamers. All your vice are belong to Nick Denton. Dot com entrepreneurialism scaled to blog size seems to be working.
comment posted at 4:03 PM on Oct-4-04

Put some fairy dust on the bastard! An unknown studio engineer made a huge contribution to the world when he recorded this juvenile squabble among the members of a British Invasion band. Their bickering about the drum sound in the follow-up to their hit single "With A Girl Like You" inspired "This Is Spinal Tap."
comment posted at 11:24 PM on Oct-3-04

What's up with Christopher Hitchens nowadays? Here is an interview with him by Johann Hari.
comment posted at 8:22 PM on Oct-2-04
comment posted at 5:34 PM on Oct-3-04
comment posted at 5:46 PM on Oct-3-04

How Bush Did. Later for the polls, pundits, and analysis. The five minute .wmv found here sums up the President's performance. Partisan, sliced, edited, and damned scary funny.
comment posted at 4:54 PM on Oct-2-04

Q: Is George Bush being quietly coached while he's speaking in public? There's a weird moment during the debate (one of many) when George Bush says "let me finish" but wasn't being interrrupted. Indymedia has a post on it too, including an mp3 of the moment. So, is Bush being coached, even during the debates, and more to the point, how did he lose when he was being fed what to say?
comment posted at 2:02 PM on Oct-4-04

FOX NEWS RUNNING THE CAMERA POOL at the DEBATES Tonight The press pool rotates who runs the cameras at the various events. Tonight, Fox News just happened to win the spin. Gives new meaning to "TV networks are flexing their muscles, saying they won't be bound by rules set by the Bush and Kerry campaigns that would prevent split-screen and reaction shots and require cameras to stay fixed on the candidate speaking." He who controls the perception of the populace, wins.
comment posted at 7:35 PM on Sep-30-04
comment posted at 10:46 PM on Sep-30-04
comment posted at 10:50 PM on Sep-30-04
comment posted at 4:05 AM on Oct-1-04
comment posted at 4:13 AM on Oct-1-04
comment posted at 6:12 AM on Oct-1-04
comment posted at 7:17 AM on Oct-1-04

Life imitates parody of life. Much like last night's Daily Show segment mocking the idea of pre-written post-debate analysis, here's the Associated Press' post-debate summary. And not a second too soon, what with the debate not starting for another five hours or so.
comment posted at 1:13 AM on Oct-1-04

Language started with emotional signaling. That's the thesis of a new book, The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker.

Lived emotional experience is key to language learning, the authors suggest. "Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics."

The book is very ambitious, and I don't think we'll ever know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky's deus ex machina "language gene" mutation.
comment posted at 5:56 PM on Sep-29-04

The folks at Comedy Central were annoyed when Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly kept referring to "The Daily Show" audience as "stoned slackers." So they did a little research. And guess whose audience is more educated?
comment posted at 7:59 PM on Sep-28-04

Mr. Bush and His 10 Ever-Changing Different Positions on Iraq: "A flip and a flop and now just a flop." Delightful Moore (to those who like what he does), and a few links to backup his reasoning for those who don't.
comment posted at 8:16 AM on Sep-28-04

Put the quarter in the slot , give it a little backspin. Hit the "1UP START" button, grip the joystick in one hand and the fire button in the other. Until fate takes your lives away--and it always does--nothing else matters.
It's the 50 Best Shooters of All Time. [via that... other filter]
comment posted at 9:38 PM on Sep-26-04
comment posted at 10:01 PM on Sep-26-04
comment posted at 2:35 AM on Sep-27-04

"Liberals want to ban the bible!" Guess I missed that meeting where "liberals" decided on this.
comment posted at 5:51 AM on Sep-26-04
comment posted at 5:54 AM on Sep-26-04
comment posted at 6:23 AM on Sep-26-04

For Westerners, the index case of subculture has to be the 1960s UK conflict between the razor-sharp, tailored mods and their mortal enemies, the greasy rockers.

Difference was critical to these first self-identified youth subcultures: difference in dress, in music, in drug of choice, in the favored mode of transport...everything. This obsessive focus on not just standing out, but standing out just so - on showing the world precisely the right angle of a hat, length of a coat, shortness of hair - has defined many a subculture since. We recognize b-boys, ganguro girls, and straightedge punks by such deployments, among many, many other identifiable groups. (It's not just a youth thing, either: leathermen and the delightfully recrudescent roller derby culture are largely adult phenomena.)

To a devotee of a given subculture, such matters, far from being a "narcissism of small differences," are a matter of pivotal import in framing how one presents oneself to the world: how we want to be seen, how we want others to understand us. But I'm getting older now, and further out of the loop, and I realize that just maybe I'm losing the ability to discern these differences in the people I pass walking down the street. I find myself asking, who and where are the new subcultures? And how do they choose to present themselves to us?
comment posted at 7:03 PM on Sep-25-04

The Situationists famously had their own ideas about cities, and about how to city them; in particular, they held forth the derive, or aimless drift, as the ideal way to encounter and make sense of urban place. It's easy to caricature the derive as an essentially passive mode of experience, but it was intended to be anything but: a playful, lively, engaged, and above all social act.

Now that cities are where most of us live, for better or worse, and we have the ability to document our travels through these conurbations and share them over the Web, might it be safe to say that Situationist psychogeography has gone mainstream? That the moblogged drift, in fact, takes things to an entirely new level, by making the city and its flows not merely more legible to ourselves, but visible to a potentially global audience?
comment posted at 10:47 PM on Sep-23-04

Sine Fiction - invented soundtracks for science fiction novels.
comment posted at 5:30 PM on Sep-22-04
comment posted at 7:40 PM on Sep-22-04
comment posted at 4:16 PM on Sep-23-04

Agitator. Blood doesn't politely trickle in Takashi Miike's films: it gushes out in (warning: NSFW, graphic) improbable fountains, painting walls and filling up small cars. His trademark point-of-view shots are taken from places other directors wouldn't dream of: the bottom of a dirty toilet bowl (as a man falls into it after being killed); within the ear canal (as it is pierced by a metal spike); even from inside a character's vagina. He has depicted incest, drug abuse, teenage prostitution, violence against women and children and small dogs, and necrophilia -- and that was just in one film, Visitor Q, his take on Pasolini's Teorema. Miike has just introduced his latest movie, Izo, at the Venice Film Festival (.pdf file). Miike is less sure about why Americans are now embracing Japanese horror films. His country's horror genre is influenced by "kwaidan," traditional Japanese ghost stories that feature revenge and malice: "The stories always have the 'hatedness.' You always bring the feelings of hate [that] you don't see in American cinema". What freaks him out the most, however, is the everyday automobile accident. "Even in a film, I can't bear to watch it -- it's so much (about) how people are weak, to be just crushed with a car. It makes me feel really depressed".
comment posted at 7:28 PM on Sep-22-04
comment posted at 7:30 PM on Sep-22-04

God hates Bush voters.
comment posted at 1:30 AM on Sep-23-04

Utilikilts: Comfort, Style and Utility for Today's Modern Man - committed to pioneering a comfortable alternative to trousers by producing "Men's Unbifurcated Garments".
I can't decide if its a joke or not. I think it began as a joke and then people started ordering them. Note the trendy Survival Kilt (currently on backorder) or the stranger looking than the others and that's saying something Denim Kilt. And don't worry about the beer gut, fellas, they've got an option for a special cut just for you ($25 upcharge but comfort knows no price!).
comment posted at 1:36 AM on Sep-23-04

No pain, no gain, they say, and when it comes to real pain, the inverse is true as well. "We now have research indicating there's a memory of chronic pain," said Dr. Doris K. Cope, director of chronic and cancer pain for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. It changes the genic code sometimes, it changes the biochemistry, and it causes new proteins to be formed." Or in other words, the more pain you have, the more pain you have. (More on this.) It's no wonder, then, that more money is spent on pain relief than any other medical problem, and that there has been so much pain research and so many clinical trials revealing such painful facts as redheads feel more pain, men feel less pain, and that there's a genetic difference between tough guys and wimps. (Much more pain inside.)

comment posted at 11:24 PM on Sep-20-04
comment posted at 5:53 PM on Sep-21-04

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. First the NYTimes, then CBS. Who will face reality?
comment posted at 1:32 AM on Sep-20-04
comment posted at 4:50 AM on Sep-26-04

Reason's Julian Sanchez thinks he's found the guy who was caught on ABC News kicking a protester at the Republican convention, whose identity has been the subject of much speculation on blogs like TalkLeft. But does this kind of thing have the potential to create the Internet's Richard Jewell?
comment posted at 6:04 PM on Sep-16-04

Dan Rather: : "If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story. Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.'" (reg. req.)

Andrew Sullivan: "Memo to Rather: you can't break that story, because someone else in pajamas already did. Check the frequency, Kenneth. You are so far from being out front on this, you are leagues behind in the dust. Have you heard of the Internet? You can find it on that weird machine in your office they call a computer."

Me: Is anyone else astonished as I am at how far CBS seems to have its head up its ass WRT news media in the 21st century?
comment posted at 5:49 PM on Sep-16-04