MetaFilter

"Everyone I've talked to knows the exact date when they've been hit."
"Yeah. It's burned into your memory."
James Gandolfini interviews 10 wounded Iraq war veterans in Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq [review]. The documentary is viewable online.
comment posted at 10:10 PM on Sep-13-07

We've discussed David L. Cunningham before, especially the controversial 9/11 docudrama he made. But there's more to the man who's the son of Christian reconstructionist and University of the Nations founder Loren Cunningham. There are a lot of movies he claims to have directed on his IMDB page that don't have any external verification outside of self-published websites, which seems to contradict IMDB policy. Then there's the fear from both pagans and various political bloggers and fans of the books that his upcoming adaptation of the The Dark is Rising fantasy books is going to completely butcher the source material. The movie is produced by Walden Media, the production company owned by conservative christian billionaire Philip Anschutz, who's trying to "clean up Hollywood", in association with 20th Century Fox.
comment posted at 5:42 AM on Aug-14-07

MAARVIN ZINDLER, EYEWITNESS NEWS!!!!
comment posted at 2:36 PM on Jul-30-07

Lindsay Lohan, America's Dream Girl*, has been a potent pop culture event ever since her rise to fame in Disney's 1998 remake of Parent Trap. As the first red haired child ever hired by Ford Modeling Agency at the age of 3, Lohan clearly had her young eye aimed at Hollywood. Her breakout role came with the 2004 release of Mean Girls. Skyrocketed into the public consciousness, Lohan quickly released two pop albums and pumped out classic films such as Herbie: Fully Loaded and Georgia Rule. With Britney Spears's descent into oblivion and Paris Hilton's problems with the law, Lohan appeared ready to supplant Britney as The It Girl. But with her rocky personal life and her love of night clubs, the party scene, strawberry quick, and after problems with her studio, and running low on cash, people wondered, could Lohan turn her life around? Sadly, that appears to be a no. After being charged with a DUI on Thursday for an accident in May, Lohan was charged with another DUI (and cocaine possession) Monday morning after chasing another car. A story is quickly unfolding involving a fired assistant, bad damage control, a bar at a rehab center, prison chic, more bad parenting and a request for privacy / denial of drug possession. Mugshots were also released. Is she the next Pete Doherty?
comment posted at 3:17 PM on Jul-25-07

Quite an entrance. Single link youtube post to a pretty damn amazing performance at the Miss Black America 2001 drag show / pageant.
comment posted at 1:33 PM on Jul-24-07

George Galloway suspended from parliament after uk parliamentary inquiry- gives speech prior to being ejected - (nsfw?). "It has come to something," he continued, "When the leading anti-war MP could get a fairer hearing in the Republican Senate than in the British House of Commons."
comment posted at 3:29 PM on Jul-24-07
comment posted at 3:32 PM on Jul-24-07

Wired presents an extraordinary look at "one of the most ambitious search-and-rescue missions in history," after one of Microsoft's researchers, Jim Gray, and his boat, the Tenacious, went missing in the Pacific Ocean outside San Francisco in January 2007. Cartography meets law meets 2.0 technology. "First the Coast Guard scoured 132,000 square miles of ocean. Then a team of scientists and Silicon Valley power players turned the eyes of the global network onto the Pacific." Eventually, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, the US Navy, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium jumped in – "as did astronomers from leading universities." To this day, Jim Gray has never been found, and his disappearance cannot be explained. Read Wired for more.
comment posted at 4:58 PM on Jul-23-07

It thinks it's people!
comment posted at 7:37 AM on Jul-22-07

Songs You Didn't Know Were Cover Versions: Good Lovin', Mambo No. 5, The City of New Orleans, Fernando, The First Cut Is the Deepest, I Love Rock 'n' Roll, Just A Gigolo, Without You, Don't Turn Around, Let's Live for Today, Dazed and Confused, Seasons in the Sun, Pass the Dutchie, There's Always Something There to Remind Me, Gloria, Respect, Turn Turn Turn, When the Levee Breaks, Do You Wanna Touch Me, Cum on Feel the Noize, Hanging on the Telephone, I Go Blind, I Will Always Love You, Take Me to the River, Louie Louie, The Twist etc. etc.
comment posted at 12:01 PM on Jul-15-07

"Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies."
comment posted at 7:18 PM on Jul-5-07

Kinetic sculpture. Will stroll the beach with you.
comment posted at 12:26 PM on May-5-07

Prominent cosmologist Simon D.M. White has written a provocative paper posted to the astrophysics arxiv complaining that too much time is being devoted to the quest to understand the nature of the elusive dark energy: "Dark Energy is undeniably an interesting problem to attack through astronomical observation, but it is one of many and not necessarily the one where significant progress is most likely to follow a major investment of resources." He worries generally that observational cosmology/astrophysics/astronomy may turn away from the construction of instruments of general utility (such as the Hubble Space Telescope), to concentrate on a small number of massive experiments narrowly focused on solving particular problems (such as WMAP and the Large Hadron Collider), to the detriment of the "quirky small-science" type of astronomy.
comment posted at 3:17 PM on Apr-21-07
comment posted at 4:14 PM on Apr-21-07

Challenge of the Super Duper Friends looks great, judging from the teaser trailer. Obama as Captain United is probably my favorite.
comment posted at 2:55 PM on Apr-21-07

It doesn't seem like it was twenty years since Stanley Kubrick produced Full Metal Jacket based on the out-of-print novel "The Short Timers" by Gustav Hasford. While out of print, the full text of "The Short Timers" is available on his (memorial) website as is the followup, "The Phantom Blooper". Hasford's bid for an Oscar was colored by the discovery of nearly ten thousand stolen library books in the same year. Some say the experience of being caught red-handed broke him, leading to his death from non-treatment of diabetes at the age of 45.
comment posted at 9:05 PM on Apr-2-07
comment posted at 9:39 PM on Apr-2-07

IPR: Irrational Public Radio "We love NPR, PRI, & MPR. We are fans of All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Car Talk, This American Life, Fresh Air, and Prarie Home Companion. We like the commentaries, the features, the independent member station programs. We love them all dearly. But we also think they're begging to be made fun of. So here we are."
comment posted at 6:47 PM on Mar-29-07

The Worst Films of "The Modern Era?" There are dozens of places to start - do you go by cost of production to theater revenue? Here's a list of criterias to make it the worst of the worst. Or perhaps by continuity errors? Blatant ignoring of the laws of immutable physics? This Christian Group has their criterias ... (American Psycho-ZERO). IMDB's "people" votes? man, there's lot of hate for "Crossover." It didn't get any noms at the "Razzies." And if your memory fails, check out the previous "losers." Is Everyone a Critic? Or the best film critic - here's Ebert's list (though I SERIOUSLY disagree on TOMMY BOY!). Many others weigh in: Digital Dreams; Maxim, Rotten Tomatoes, Stinkers (in alphabetical order); Metacritic and Leonard Maltin for your PDA/mobile (you'll have to do a sort on BOMB). And of course, (NSFW) the worst porn titles. Er, Enjoy!
comment posted at 6:43 PM on Mar-27-07

"It is very rare I am lost for words but I saw the statue last week and it is awesome - a tremendous tribute to a great man. [Southampton] Fans have waited a long time for this and it is going to be fantastic. I really believe it will be the best football statue anywhere both in size and the amount of detail" -- Ted Bates Trust chairman Dave Ford

Then again, maybe not.
comment posted at 11:57 AM on Mar-27-07

Happy 59th Birthday, Steven Victor Tallarico. His full name anagrams to "Vertical, not so Vertical", but he is better known as, Steven Tyler, the leader singer of America's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll band, Aerosmith. As a 19 year old from hardscrabble suburban satellite city Yonkers, NY, Steven was an attendee of the original Woodstock Peace and Music Festival in 1969, and then again as a performer in 1994. He is one half of the infamous toxic twins, a drummer, singer of sprituals, front man par excellence and a famous collector of scarves. He fathered a child with über hot model, singer, muse and groupie extraordinaire, Bebe Buell [NSFW!!]. However, she so hated Steven, that she raised their daughter Liv as Liv Rundgren (daughter of Todd) until Liv discovered the truth at age 9, when she noticed that she was a dead ringer for Tyler's other daughter, Mia. Please join me in wishing Mr. Tyler a happy 59th because, given the life he's led, he probably doesn't have too many more of these left.
comment posted at 3:56 PM on Mar-26-07
comment posted at 4:11 PM on Mar-26-07

The Wii Loop Machine. Via.
comment posted at 2:27 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 3:36 PM on Mar-22-07

Starbucking, the true story of one man's highly caffeinated journey. Starbucking is a documentary film that follows Winter, a man who has dedicated his life to visiting every Starbucks in the world. He's been to 6,000 Starbucks (and counting) since 1997, and is trying to break his record of visiting 28 Starbucks in a day. So, "sit back, have a cup of joe, and watch as one man defies society's norms in a never ending search for the lady in green."
comment posted at 12:45 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 1:01 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 1:02 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 1:07 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 1:20 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 1:32 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 2:36 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 3:10 PM on Mar-22-07
comment posted at 3:22 PM on Mar-22-07

A time-lapse video of someone painting Thom Yorke in photoshop. Absolutely amazing.
comment posted at 5:33 AM on Mar-4-07

Mac VS PC And this time PC is the cool guy and Mac is the stooge! Gems like "Mac works for PC", "PC gets the girl." and "Mac may be cool but PC has the money." (Quicktime links)
comment posted at 3:36 AM on Mar-4-07
comment posted at 3:59 AM on Mar-4-07
comment posted at 4:04 AM on Mar-4-07

Redefining Avogadro's Number. A mole is the number of molecules in a gram of water: ~6.022 x 10²³. Unfortunately "a gram" is defined by a chunk of metal in a vault in France, the last of the seven SI units still defined by a physical artifact. Since the reference mass (known as "Le Gran K") is actually changing over time (due to cleaning, handling, etc), the definition of a gram is currently temporally unstable. Now a new proposal has been put forward to explicitly define the number to be a known integer: 602,214,141,070,409,084,099,072, which would fundamentally change the way we define a gram. Le Gran K could become a historical curiosity like the original platinum meter stick.
comment posted at 5:07 AM on Mar-2-07
comment posted at 5:38 AM on Mar-2-07

Tea Birds Nothing but pictures of cute girls at tea. A tea blog like no other. [nsfw]
comment posted at 1:29 PM on Feb-23-07
comment posted at 2:11 PM on Feb-23-07

Say What Again [audio NSFW] Pulp Fiction dialogue done with motion typography. [via]
comment posted at 2:13 PM on Feb-23-07

Dave Sim gets a book proposal from a furry.
comment posted at 1:58 PM on Feb-23-07

The Fountain "No matter how good CGI looks at first, it dates quickly...So I set the ridiculous goal of making a film that would reinvent space without using CGI." Director Aronofsky tapped into the microphotography work of Parks and Parks to bring a new look to special effects in science fiction cinema.
comment posted at 5:00 AM on Feb-14-07
comment posted at 5:03 AM on Feb-14-07

I Am Trying to Believe. Well, maybe not. (Previously: Best, shortest review of a NIN cd, ever.)
comment posted at 1:27 PM on Feb-13-07

News Filter Anna Nicole Smith collapses and dies suddenly.
comment posted at 1:58 PM on Feb-8-07

Identicons are small graphic representations of IP address.
comment posted at 7:05 PM on Jan-28-07

How not to drive a Humvee in traffic in Baghdad.
comment posted at 4:26 PM on Jan-27-07

If anyone can put together a kick-ass concert DVD, it's Trent Reznor. For your consideration: Nine Inch Nail's upcoming "Beside You In Time," which will be released in HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and some format from the late-90's they are referring to as simply DVD (this is apparently the first music DVD ever to be released on all three formats). View the trailer and some clips here in 1080P (if you're computer and eyes can handle it). Or, if you're lucky enough to live in one of the chosen cities, attend a screening.
comment posted at 5:35 PM on Jan-27-07