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So you're on a trip to Japan with your mate before the World Cup. Your mate generously offers to wait for your bag at the carousel and tells you take his bag through customs. Next thing you know you are sitting in prison with frostbite possibly for the next 20 years. Your mum sets up a website to help get you out. Your "mate" is later arrested in Belgium for duping someone else, denies everything and is released on bail. Years later he is found dead on a railway line in Gloucester. You're still in jail after your final court hearing. Your 3 year old son doesn't understand where daddy has gone.

Nothing wrong with worldwide drug importation laws. Nothing at all.
comment posted at 5:23 AM on Aug-17-05

The coolest door ever.
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The Goddess Bunny (Quicktime req) • IMDB user review • The documentary
comment posted at 6:46 AM on Aug-15-05

UpdateFilter: Schiavo autopsy results --contrary to those who used this poor shell of a woman as a political football and fundraiser, Schiavo was not abused, was blind so could not possibly have seen a balloon or her loved ones, and had a brain half the normal weight that was massively and irreversibly damaged. previous posts here--and just one example of the many many lies printed about her and her husband here. Some people should really be ashamed of themselves.
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Little visual miracles. For more than forty years that most American of photographers, Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters Lee Friedlander, has recorded modern American urban life -- with its jumble of people, signs, buildings, and cars, and television sets. He likes to turn a common blunder of amateurs -- photographing something nearby with one's back to the sun -- into a leitmotif. His shadow plays the role of alter ego, sticking to the back of a woman's fur collar, clinging to a lamppost as a parade of drum majorettes passes by, reclining like a stuffed doll on a chair. Clever jigsaw puzzles, his pictures frequently reveal themselves to be laconic, austere poems to what Friedlander has termed "the American social landscape',' meaning mostly ordinary places and affairs. "Friedlander," an exhibition of more than 480 photographs and 25 books covering decades of work, runs at MoMA through Aug. 29, before traveling to Europe until 2007. More inside.
comment posted at 12:18 PM on Jun-14-05

Debt relief cannot come too soon for Swaziland's King Mswati III who took an 18-year-old former Miss Teen Swaziland finalist as his 12th wife during the weekend, barely two weeks after marrying his 11th. Swaziland the smallest country in Africa ranked 137 on the UN's Human Development Report also has one of the world's highest AIDS rates with 40% of the adult population infected with HIV. Perhaps Bono, who recently complained that the corruption is just an excuse for inaction, will send some condoms as a wedding gift.
comment posted at 12:45 PM on Jun-13-05

Bunnock - a game of skill, accuracy... and horse bones. Register your team for the world championship!
comment posted at 9:21 AM on Jun-10-05

Men, you don't control your own pecker, at least in Virginia. A nice young man in a happy, heterosexual marriage discovers that Virginia state law REQUIRES a 30 day waiting period before he can get a vasectomy. All your gonads belong to us?
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The American Taliban. Christian fundamentalists in their own words.
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Supreme Court outlaws medical marijuana.
comment posted at 12:37 PM on Jun-6-05

Julians Beever draws on sidewalks with chalk. His drawings range from insects to commercial objects to self portraits. I don't know if he designs them on a his laptop, but as with LCD screens, viewing angle is critically important.
comment posted at 11:45 AM on Jun-4-05

The making of a D-Day tradition... I immediately get goosebumps when I hear the score of Band of Brothers...I'm not sure why, maybe it was my local connections (Dick Winters, Bill Guanere, Albert Blithe, Babe Heffron, Thomas Meehan, Ralph Spina, Harry Welsh, and Robert Strayer are all from Philadelphia), the surrounding suburbs, or Pennsylvania), or maybe it was because the original airings took place in the shadow of 9/11 (the premiere was September 9th, 2001, with the D-Day drop occuring in the second episode, Day of Days, on 9/16/2001), but this series will ALWAYS have a special place in my heart. Everything is done so beautifully, from the special effects, to the sound, the music, to the dutiful translation from Stephen Ambrose book to the screen. It's certainly worthy of the 9.5 out of 10 that IMDB readers had given it. Every year now since, either HBO (On Demand - you have to subscribe to HBO plus have digital cable) or the History Channel has played Tom Hanks' and Steven Spielberg's masterful WW2 epic. You can think of it as Saving Private Ryan, but 3 times as long. Even if war movies are not your thing, I can almost guarantee that they will see the human side of the soldier and becomely deeply invested in the characters. Follow the men of Easy Company from training and the running of Currahee, to the parachute jump on D-Day, through the liberation of Europe, the horror of a German concentration camp, and eventually to the end of the war, to Hitler's mountaintop retreat. I'm not the only one - check out the numerous fan sites to BoB (forum shorthand for Band of Brothers) here, here, and here, as well as entries on TVTome, Wikipedia, and Television without Pity. If you want to try before you commit to watching the whole thing, I'd recommend the episodes Day of Days, Crossroads, and the Breaking Point.
comment posted at 12:10 PM on Jun-4-05

Online poker company's flotation sends owners into billionaires list. Party Poker.com has announced plans to float on the London Stock exchange. This will see the biggest online gambling site on the planet get even bigger. Will the stock market be happy with the current returns or are the voracious demands of shareholders mean we are going to see more people needing help?
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How are the San Francisco 49ers trained to handle the media? Apparently with a film involving naked lesbians, jokes about gay marriage, and offensive asian stereotypes (complete with buck teeth). The San Francisco Chronicle has the whole video online. The owners have apologized for the video (even though they could have put a stop to it when they saw it 5 months ago) , but the players are comparing it to Chapelle's Show.
comment posted at 12:21 PM on Jun-2-05

"If you don't like that, I'm sorry." Jon Bolton, Bush nominee for Ambassador to the UN, discusses the United Nations with humility and patriotic aplomb.
comment posted at 6:37 AM on Jun-2-05

Bush: America Will Honor Fallen Soldiers ARLINGTON, Va. -- Quoting letters of the fallen from the war in Iraq, President Bush vowed Monday to a Memorial Day audience of military families and soldiers in uniform that the nation will honor its dead by striving for peace and democracy, no matter what the cost.

"We must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the terrorists," the president told a supportive crowd of several thousand people at Arlington National Cemetery.
comment posted at 7:54 PM on May-30-05

After 35 years behind bars and 25 failed requests for parole, Junior Allen will be set free.
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(As any Mets geek might say when talking to Mike & the Mad Dog: First time [MeFi] poster, long time reader)
Underestimating the Fog...No, not crochety ol' McNamara's take on the situation in Iraq. Rather, it's an astonishing (if only partial) recanting [.pdf] by the patron saint of statheads, seamheads, and rotogeeks everywhere, Bill James. Like his namesake, James is a radical empiricist, the Jedi master who defined sabermetrics (his coinage) as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Over the past several decades, James' influence has been enormous. After Michael Lewis famously detailed the saber-success of Billy Beane's Oakland A's, Sabermetric-leaning analysts have made their way into the scouting ranks and GM's offices of a growing number of major league ballclubs. From the halls of academia [.pdf] to newspapers and Cable personalities, even the NFL and NBA are on board!
comment posted at 10:30 AM on May-27-05

What is Torture? Slate does an in-depth primer on American interrogation, with the chain of command, legal memos, a taxonomy of torture tactics "listed in order from least to most severe" (which roughly corresponds to the Human Rights Watch Table of Interrogation Techniques Recommended/Approved by U.S. Officials), and military reports.
comment posted at 6:03 AM on May-27-05

Canadian suicide hotline stops its 24 hour service and adopts a 9-to-5 format. Apparently, people only feel like killing themselves at work. Located via Fark.
comment posted at 5:02 AM on May-26-05
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The Empire Strikes Back. Want that bittorrent of the new Star Wars movie? You won't find it on elitetorrents.org, the site where the file first appeared.
comment posted at 5:06 AM on May-26-05

We really want you in the Army. Not all citizen journalism happens in blogs, folks. A 15-year-old with a couple of cameras and a sister caught the Army willing to bend both laws and ethics in order to get him enlisted. (Military recruitment previously discussed here, as well as other places that I'm too lazy to search for).
comment posted at 5:59 AM on May-26-05

Step Aside Ben Hur ! [video and audio, prob SFW] Welcome the American Chariot. Unlike the evil Segway, whose self-balancing ability smells of sulfur, the Chariot obeys the laws of gravity and delivers a powerful commanding post for the discerning officer.
comment posted at 6:09 AM on May-23-05