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"Men working on the river would move in time to the beat of the music. It was everywhere: on the street, in the church. In the tonks and barrelhouses where people went to be together. Like the beating of a big heart. It gave everyone a good feeling." The Cradle is Rocking is a delightful 12-minute film that, though somewhat damaged (Folkstreams has found what may be the only surviving print), is highly recommended viewing for anyone interested in American roots music: in this case, New Orleans jazz. The film's thoughtful and affable narrator is trumpeter George "Kid Sheik" Cola, who can be heard along with Captain John Handy serving up some fine old-school Dixieland jazz here and here.
comment posted at 5:05 AM on Dec-10-09

The Roches on the Today Show, Christmas 1990. Joy To The World::Angels We Have Heard On High::God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen::The First Nöel::Adeste Fidelis::Hallelujah Chorus Saturday Night Live '79
comment posted at 5:26 PM on Dec-9-09

The public's opinion of the field of climatology has been shaken by the leaked CRU emails. While it's arguable that the messages show any wrongdoing, many pundits have now reached the conclusion that global warming is a hoax, coverup and conspiracy, years in the making with millions of faked datapoints. Sarah Palin has written an editorial saying Obama should boycott the Copenhagen COP15 summit.
comment posted at 2:30 PM on Dec-9-09

A Visit to the Pratt University Steam Plant. Antique electrical and mechanical. Brass, copper, iron, oak and stone. It smells of warm oil.
comment posted at 4:58 AM on Dec-9-09

Henry Miller had always loved art. He first began painting after seeing some Turner prints in a Brooklyn department-store window. There was only one minor drawback: he couldn’t draw. But his best friend, Emil Schnellock, could, and Miller became his disciple. It wasn’t long before he realized that what he lacked in draftsmanship, he made up for in color and composition sense. (previously)
comment posted at 4:02 PM on Dec-8-09

During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million. The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history.
comment posted at 4:24 AM on Dec-8-09

"The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds."
comment posted at 4:32 AM on Dec-8-09

How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic: "...a handy one-stop shop for all the material you should need to rebut the more common anti-global warming science arguments constantly echoed across the internet."
comment posted at 2:17 PM on Dec-5-09
comment posted at 3:09 PM on Dec-5-09

He was elected at the nadir of the worst depression in history; 25% of the workforce was unemployed, two million were homeless. Yet in the face of this, he made us an optimistic and far-reaching New Deal, creating among other programs a federal minimum wage, social security, and the FDIC. He pulled us out of dire financial straits and, when our country was called upon to fight in World War II, he brought us to the cusp of victory. In his unprecedented thirteen years in office, he cemented his undisputed legacy as one of the greatest presidents in American history. But before he could achieve any of this, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a promise to keep — a promise to the "wet vote," whose indispensable support he had called upon in 1932 during his first presidential campaign when he promised to repeal the 18th Amendment and end Prohibition. And thus, as legend has it, immediately after his first fireside chat from the White House in March 1933, Roosevelt turned to his two top aides and said, "I think it's time for a beer." And yes, indeed, it was.
comment posted at 7:23 AM on Dec-5-09

People who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome may have an answer as to why Nobody knows what causes CFS and fibromyalgia, for many years doctors poo-poohed the patient and sent them home with anti-anxiety drugs, but studies now show that there is a link to this retrovirus and these disorders. It's not in your head. Some studies earlier showed a link between prostate cancer and this virus, but the jury is still out on this. It's thought to be sexually transmitted via the blood, and actually binds with human DNA.
comment posted at 3:51 PM on Dec-3-09

Tokyo Blues is a photography book about taking a closer look at the ordinary, in this case an omnipresent blue construction tarp which shows up just about everywhere in Tokyo. This is the first book in an apparently planned series by Do Projects. The book is available for sale or as a free PDF under the CC license.
comment posted at 4:01 PM on Dec-3-09

HDR photography seems to be polarizing. People either love it, or hate it, including here on MeFi. For those who enjoy exploring the possibilities HDR presents, a good place to start is Stuck In Customs. Trey Ratcliff has the first HDR photo ever to hang in the Smithsonian. He offers a comprehensive, six-step HDR tutorial if you want to try it yourself. A sampling of his HDR travel photography is here, and throughout the site, and he is also experimenting with HDR video technology.
comment posted at 4:51 AM on Dec-3-09

Possibly the biggest company you've never heard of.
comment posted at 3:21 PM on Dec-2-09

Retro Renovation celebrates an era of post-war American housing that's being slowly eroded by the likes of HGTV.
comment posted at 1:50 PM on Dec-2-09

Animated Advent Calendar [via mefi projects] Want a way to count down the days till the Santa (with or without companion(s)) comes to town, but you don't want to go out and spend money on a disposable bit of proto-landfill with daily entries that don't dance? The Online Advent Calendar is your answer. The '08 version is also available for viewing.
comment posted at 5:11 PM on Dec-1-09

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has been reprinted, abridged, disected, redrawn and re-told on film numerous times, but the original 66 page manuscript has rarely been seen by the public. The manuscript was obtained by The Morgan Library & Museum during the 1890s, where it is currently on display. If you can't make it to New York this time of year, you can take a close look at 4 heavily edited pages and attempt to decipher Dickens' original writing, thanks to The New York Times.
comment posted at 2:02 PM on Dec-1-09

Tomorrow in Las Vegas, a mixed hotel/condominium called Vdara will open for business on the spot once occupied by the unlamented Boardwalk Hotel and Casino. It is the first stage of the CityCenter complex, the largest privately financed development in the United States, which has already cost $8.5 billion and six lives. Even before the recent debt-restructuring woes of 50% stakeholder Dubai World, there was concern over CityCenter's impact on the struggling local economy. (previously)
comment posted at 1:55 PM on Nov-30-09

"The name Vanilla Ice evokes the sweet charm, the unknowing innocence of another time. In a world of school shootings, mass murders, endless wars, and economic despair, we miss that time." Catching up with Ice Man Robert Van Winkle after his career in music cooled down.
comment posted at 3:07 PM on Nov-29-09

The best space shuttle launch video you will see today. As compiled and edited by NASA's SE&I imagery team at Johnson Space Center.
comment posted at 3:25 PM on Nov-29-09

Roger Avary, Oscar-winning screenwriter for Pulp Fiction and many other films, pled guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter and drunken driving, following a crash that killed a passenger in his car in 2008. This September, he began to serve his sentence of one year in jail (followed by five years of probation). Naturally, he also began tweeting about it. The bleak literary quality of his tweets (in which he refers to himself only as "#34") caught the attention of Mark Millan at the LA Times -- and shortly thereafter, of the authorities.
comment posted at 8:15 AM on Nov-28-09
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comment posted at 2:35 PM on Nov-28-09

Montréal Mirabel Airport was opened in 1975 at the cost of $2 billion adjusted. Ultimately its tarmac and runway areas alone were to take up 70 km² (27 mi²) of space and would have made it the world's largest airport. The airport never got any busier than Boise Airport is today, and the passenger terminals are now abandoned shells (slideshow). A key factor in the failure was that for 22 years authorities banned all international flights from the much-closer, thriving Dorval Airport, heavily used by locals and business travellers. It didn't help that Montreal was already sliding into decline in the 1970s due to the growth of the Great Lakes and Toronto-based economies and uncertainties about Quebec's political climate. Montreal is no stranger to alleged boondoggles: Olympic Stadium, half-finished during the 1976 Summer Games, spiralled $1 billion over budget.
comment posted at 1:17 PM on Nov-27-09

Feast

Images of food—and the preparation of food—invariably have that effect on people. They unite viewers who might otherwise have nothing in common; they plug directly into the primal craving for transitory pleasure, the desire not just to admire and then consume inventively prepared food, but also to serve (and be served by) people who love us.

comment posted at 7:21 AM on Nov-26-09

La Gioconda, Tristan und Isolde, The Pearl Fishers, Il Trovatore, and Rigoletto — enacted with 16-inch rod puppets.
comment posted at 2:50 PM on Nov-24-09

Prelude On The Esplanade| Introductory Fanfare For The Hooper Heroes| Movement I: In The Countenance Of Kings| Movement II: Sleeping Invader| Interlude I—Dream Sequence in Subi Circumnavigation| Movement III: Linear Tableau with Intersecting Surprise| Movement IV: Traffic Shock| Movement V: Self-Organizing Emergent Patterns| Interlude II: Subi Power Waltz| Interlude III: Invisible Accidents| Movement VI: Isorhythmic Night Dance with Interchanges| Movement VII (Finale): The Emperor of Centrifuge| Postlude: Critical Mass | The Sleeping Red Wolves
comment posted at 5:41 AM on Nov-24-09

What should we do instead of the Obama health reform bill?
comment posted at 2:53 PM on Nov-20-09

When Jonathan Coulton scheduled his October 10th show at Chicago's Park West, he didn't know that fellow nerd-rockers They Might Be Giants were playing on the same day, at the same time, in the nearby Vic Theater. Not only that, the Giants were performing their hit 1990 album Flood in its entirety. In a tongue-in-cheek effort to make sure somebody showed up for his performace, Coulton, along with Paul and Storm, decided to perform their own take on Flood. Hightlights included absolutely no accordion ("that's a selling point"). In nine parts on YouTube. Audio recorded directly from the venue's soundboard.
comment posted at 4:15 PM on Nov-19-09

Kyle Cassidy's In The Hive "As fine art photography increasingly at times adopts the tropes of snapshots I often find myself in galleries wondering if the artist didn't possess some sort of faulty camera whose shutter tripped randomly... I asked twenty-three people scattered around the U.S. to wear their cameras everywhere and over the next 48 hours I sent eleven text messages at random intervals asking everyone to take a photo of whatever was in front of them at that moment."
comment posted at 1:39 PM on Nov-19-09

Armchair Viewing
comment posted at 3:44 AM on Nov-18-09

On Thursday, the 12th of November, Karen Armstrong (previously & previously) unveiled her Charter for Compassion. The charter is the product of her Feb 2008 TED prize wish to “restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.” The project began with a “unique web-based decision making platform”, allowing “thousands of people from over 100 countries added their voice to the writing of the Charter.” These contributions were then given to the Council of Conscience for the construction of the final charter. Previous attempts at the promotion of a "global ethic" grounded in the Golden Rule have been largely, globally, ignored. Some people dislike the idea of blurring the differences between religions, some have problems with the Golden Rule itself.
comment posted at 4:31 PM on Nov-17-09

LIFE magazine presents previously unpublished photos of Vladimir Nabokov, taken by Carl Mydens in 1959.
comment posted at 5:04 PM on Nov-17-09

Charles Van Schaick was a photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin in the late 19th and early 20th Century. His work was made famous by Michael Lesy in the book Wisconsin Death Trip in which the photographs were juxtaposed with local newsreports of murder, suicide, disease, insanity, animal mutilation and other calamities plus the occasional non-morbid event. Flickr set of photos used in Wisconsin Death Trip. Some of the texts from Wisconsin Death Trip. Robert Birnbaum interviews Michael Lesy about Wisconsin Death Trip and other things. Over 2500 photographs by Charles Van Schaick owned by The Wisconsin Historical Society. [Warning: Some of the photographs are of deceased infants]
comment posted at 4:57 AM on Nov-16-09

Doug Sahm was a country music prodigy.
comment posted at 2:42 PM on Nov-15-09

NPR's jazz blog A Blog Supreme recently concluded a series in which they asked jazz bloggers to "name five albums you would recommend to somebody looking to get into modern jazz". The results are now up in the category Jazz Now; the intro has the index, including reactions elsewhere. Destination: Out had some pricklier suggestions—see also their best of the 90s list (and their own nominations).
comment posted at 3:42 PM on Nov-14-09

In How to Write a Great Novel authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Hilary Mantel, Orhan Pamuk, Junot Díaz and Margaret Atwood speak about their writing process. If you want your thoughts on writing in a longer format, you could do a lot worse than The New York Times' Writers on Writing series, which features short essays by, for example, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Louise Erdrich and Annie Proulx. Should you thirst for meditations longer yet, Barbara Demarco-Barrett has on her Writers on Writing radio show interviewed a boatload of authors and it is available as a podcast [iTunes link]
comment posted at 4:50 AM on Nov-12-09

Nabokov, Meet 50 Cent: Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind. "Those who have been paying attention to Zadie Smith since her White Teeth debut likely already know about her affinities for E.M. Forster, Lil Wayne, George Eliot, Kafka, and Fawlty Towers. She's one of probably three working writers capable of smuggling a riff on the perils of "keeping it real" into The New York Review of Books."
comment posted at 2:56 PM on Nov-11-09

It appears that the Lost Army of Cambyses has been found.
comment posted at 1:11 PM on Nov-9-09

Few men can reach the notes, and few women have the lung capacity to manipulate them. Most of these arias have not been heard since the deaths of the castrati for whom they were written. Mezzosoprano Cecilia Bartoli has released an album entitled Sacrificium. The album is a compilation of 17th-century arias written for castrati--male singers who were castrated in order to sing in a higher register. Commentaries on the work are favorable; commentaries on the history of castrati and Bartoli herself are just as interesting.
comment posted at 1:23 PM on Nov-9-09

The Kalinin K-7 was a giant flying fortress that might have redefined aerial combat in the 1930s. The hugely expensive and trouble-prone prototype was scrapped by Stalin and its designer was later executed. Here are some renderings of the planes that might have been, with spacious lounges, battleship-sized cannons, and the ability to defend us from UFOs.
comment posted at 6:33 AM on Nov-8-09
comment posted at 8:47 AM on Nov-8-09

The Mineral Makeup Mutiny was founded to encourage consumers to buy indie self-made mineral cosmetics, instead of overpriced makeup that were repackaging wholesale micas from companies such as TKB Trading, or publishing contradicting ingredients lists and sending Cease-and-Desist Letters to unfavourable reviews. Miss K of Aromaleigh, founder of the Mutiny (and former seller of repackaged wholesale hues, which she's discontinuing in favour of original colours), demonstrates how mineral eyeshadows are made.
comment posted at 6:52 AM on Nov-8-09

Whether working with the Nicholas Brothers (Previously), working with the muppets, working with that funny, funny, funny reefer man, or making out with your wife, Cab Calloway never fails to entertain.
comment posted at 11:49 AM on Nov-7-09
comment posted at 2:35 PM on Nov-7-09

The frequently excellent photo-blog The Big Picture at the Boston Globe has posted a collection of stunning and, well, alien-looking photos of the martian landscape.
comment posted at 4:08 AM on Nov-7-09

Soldier Kills 12, wounds 31 at Fort Hood Two descriptions of the alleged killer. One from the New York Times describes the suspect as unwilling to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, and some of his background, the second talks about some different aspects of his past.
comment posted at 4:15 AM on Nov-6-09

For the first time in 27 years an American has won the New York Marathon. Meb Keflezighi (a 2004 Olympic U.S. Silver Medalist) is "thrilled to win his first marathon ever." However, CNBC reporter Darren Rovell deemed Keflezighi's victory an "empty win" because he "is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he's not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement...Nothing against Keflezighi, but he’s like a ringer who you hire to work a couple hours at your office so that you can win the executive softball league." Keflezighi was born in the African country of Eritrea and "...immigrated to the United States at age 12...he is an American citizen and a product of American distance running programs at the youth, college and professional levels."* Oh, the last American to win the New York Marathon: Alberto Salazar. He was born in Cuba who came to the U.S. when he was 2 years old.
comment posted at 4:19 PM on Nov-3-09

Raquel Rolnik is the U.N.'s new Special Rappoteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. So far, she has investigated forced evictions in Phnom Penh and housing destroyed by rising sea levels in the Maldives. This week, she's investigating whether limited access to affordable housing is a human rights violation in the U.S.
comment posted at 4:02 PM on Nov-3-09
comment posted at 5:55 PM on Nov-3-09