MetaFilter posts by caddis.
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Journalism. There have been lots of complaints in the US about reporters not asking the tough questions, especially when they contradict the prevailing view, or the current administration's view. Here are some reporters who won't accept a weasel answer.
posted on Aug-5-06 at 4:39 PM
Design Lab 2006 (flash and sound) Are you a college student with an eye toward design? Design a cool appliance and win 5,000 Euros. For the rest of us there are previous winners, such as this airwash waterless washing machine.
posted on Aug-2-06 at 4:34 PM
What's playing? What songs are playing on the radio right now and where, an interactive map. Less fun, but much more useful is the site's ability to look up a station and tell you what songs they recently played. (via J-Walk)
posted on Aug-1-06 at 8:42 AM
Top 100 Music Videos, according to Stylus. Last month Pitchfork made their pitch for a hundred awesome music videos. This month it's Stylus's turn.
posted on Jul-22-06 at 8:16 PM
Safe at Any Speed With higher speed limits, our highways have been getting safer.
posted on Jul-21-06 at 11:00 AM
50 Albums that changed music. Fifty years old this month, the album chart has tracked the history of pop. But only a select few records have actually altered the course of music.
posted on Jul-19-06 at 8:47 AM
The rhythm method kills more embryos than condoms. Some proponents of the pro-life movement argue against morning after pills, IUDs, and contraceptive pills on grounds of a concern for causing embryonic death. What has gone unnoticed, however, is that the pro-life line of argumentation can be extended to the rhythm method of contraception as well. Given certain plausible empirical assumptions, the rhythm method may well be responsible for a much higher number of embryonic deaths than some other contraceptive techniques.
posted on Jul-18-06 at 8:13 AM
Brooklyn (via Grow a Brain)
posted on Jul-16-06 at 9:37 PM
We all have to go sometime. Frank Russo has an obsession, dead ballplayers. Some died in accidents, some were murdered, some couldn't take it anymore, and some were cursed. They were all human. (via HNT)
posted on Jul-9-06 at 1:45 PM
Reverse Color Blindness Test "normal vision humans have a lower degree of color contrast detection in the red spectrum. A colorblind person shouldn't be burdened by that lowered contrast sensitivity and should be able to see the object immediately by picking out the change in contrast at the objects edges" A small oddity that takes but a few seconds of time. (via The Presurfer)
posted on Jun-28-06 at 8:14 PM
Radio streams on the net. A huge compendium of radio stations around the globe which have internet feeds.
posted on Jun-14-06 at 10:08 AM
Princeton Salutatorian - Undocumented Immigrant. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Princeton '06, has achieved many academic honors. He is also in the US illegally. He has now spoken out. "[A] former roommate of mine wrote that illegal immigrants constitute a drain on American resources and a threat to the jobs of native American workers; that they are intentional law-breakers who should not receive considerate treatment from the government; and that existing laws concerning illegal immigrants should be rigidly and more consistently enforced, even if this results in behavior that could be characterized as inhumane. I was taken aback by his words, but they provided me with the impetus to speak out and emphasize the inhumanity of such a perspective as well as the misinformation it is based upon."
posted on Jun-10-06 at 5:11 AM
Xenu's chariot. Gentlemen,ignite your potential start your Thetans.
posted on Jun-8-06 at 12:41 PM
THE EVOLUTION OF THE JUST WAR TRADITION: DEFINING JUS POST BELLUM For nearly two thousand years, the just war tradition has provided critical moral guidance on the initiation of war and on conduct during warfare. Today, the tradition must evolve to analyze and develop criteria to apply to jus post bellum.
posted on Jun-1-06 at 1:44 PM
Rosie O'Donnell - Flickr
posted on Apr-28-06 at 8:05 PM
Abraham Lincoln, duelist? Hamilton and Burr were not the only prominent duelists in US history. In the early morning hours of September 22, 1842, a young Abraham Lincoln crossed the Mississippi River at Alton, IL on his way to a small island where he would engage in mortal combat with a political adversary. Lincoln had used his sarcastic wit to write anonymous letters to the editor lampooning a political rival, James Shields. Some of his friends joined in and perhaps went a little too far, including suggestions of Shields' inadequacies with the ladies. One of these friends included Lincoln's future wife, Mary Todd. Shields demanded a duel and Lincoln defined the parameters of the duel - broadswords in a pit.
posted on Apr-24-06 at 4:16 PM
Antique Spectacles David Fleishman, M.D., a retired ophthalmologist, has compiled a rather extensive collection of information about spectacles and their importance in history. In addition to many examples of early spectacles and information about the spectacles worn by figures in history, there is a general history - Eyeglasses Through the Ages:[R]eading glasses are one of the most important inventions of the past 2000 years.... No one really knows about the early history of image magnification. In ancient times, someone noticed that convex-shaped glass magnified images. Sometime between the year 1000 and 1250 crude technology began to develop regarding reading stones (simple magnifiers). English Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon (1220 -1292), in his 1268 ‘Opus Majus’, noted that letters could be seen better and larger when viewed through less than half a sphere of glass. Bacon's experiments confirmed the principle of the convex (converging) lens, described by Alhazen (965-1038) Arabian mathematician, optician and astronomer at Cairo, and even earlier by the Greeks. (via the dead tree version of the WSJ)
posted on Apr-6-06 at 9:13 AM
Who's having some fun today?
posted on Apr-1-06 at 6:39 AM
A vessel to fill with mirth. Drinking vessels from days of yore, including Lord Byron's skull cup, a fuddling cup, a black jack (leather cup), a pot crown ( a precursor to the beer helmet?), and a whistle cup. The site contains lots of other wine history as well. Ah, but they didn't have lover's cups back then. (via Cynical-C)
posted on Mar-24-06 at 8:47 AM
Things we already knew: Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. ... A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.
posted on Mar-22-06 at 3:19 PM
Waste some time on a lazy Sunday with Monty Python's Silly Walks Generator.
posted on Mar-12-06 at 9:28 AM
US Troop poll results in: 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately. In other news, 58% of Americans think the troops should stay. Back to the troops: 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”
posted on Feb-28-06 at 12:15 PM
An ambitious time capsule. In the basement of Phoebe Hearst Hall at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, there is a stainless steel vault door which was welded shut over sixty five years ago. Behind this door lies a 20' x 10' waterproofed room containing a menagerie of once-modern artifacts and microfilm records, placed there by men and women in the years between 1937 and 1940. If their goal is realized, the contents of this vault will remain unseen and undisturbed for the next 6,107 years. Official site, pictures, and inventory. (link lovingly pilfered from another filter)
posted on Feb-23-06 at 12:59 PM
Gore in '08? Several weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore told the Associated Press that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 2008.” His words were eerily reminiscent of a quote from another former Vice President, Richard Nixon, who told the same Associated Press in November of 1965 that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 1968.”
posted on Feb-22-06 at 9:57 AM
A lapsed neocon speaks out: The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them.... After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." ... We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.
posted on Feb-18-06 at 10:43 PM
Let's go quail hunting. (flash) Don't drink too much. We all had a good laugh over the Dick Cheney Quail Hunting game (Deadeye Dick sure is quite a shooter), but here you actually get to shoot some quail. (my apologies to PETA and Harry Whittington) Sorry, but this will only waste about five minutes of your time this Friday.
posted on Feb-17-06 at 7:42 AM
Witches. Who they are, how to tell, what to do. One example.
posted on Feb-11-06 at 9:20 AM
Real Estate Value + Google Maps Fly around a neighborhood with Google maps and see not only the houses but what they are worth. Click on an individual house for recent selling information, house details, tax assessments etc., all for free and no strings attached.
posted on Feb-10-06 at 4:54 AM
Was Gonzales truthful? Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said. So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.
posted on Feb-8-06 at 10:47 PM
Motown history traded for Super Bowl parking. (mostly audio) The Motown Center in Detroit was torn down a few weeks ago and turned into Super Bowl parking. Although not the main recording studios, and long abandoned, it still contained many Motown documents and memorabilia, most of which were lost in the razing. Covered by local bloggers: dETROITfUNK (1, 2) , Detroit Blog (1, 2, 3, 4), and Kempa, plus local tv.
posted on Feb-6-06 at 8:08 PM
Surreptitious cell phonestalking tracking. Stalkers are no longer limited to just your call history. For a small fee and with a few minutes access to her cell phone the author was able to track his girlfriend's cell phone location within a hundred yards or so and the cell phone provides no trace that it was happening. Traceamobile.com appears to be one site offering such a service. Mologogo was discussed here previously but does not appear to be surreptitious. (Appears to be limited to UK for right now.)
posted on Feb-4-06 at 6:29 AM
Dumb Moments. Post your embarrassing moments and cringe at those of others. Related Doctor moments here.
posted on Feb-1-06 at 9:19 AM
Now, even congressmen get in on abusing Wikipedia. Marty Meehan's staffers admit editing out negative information about the congressman from his Wikipedia entry. According to the article, Rep. Meehan is not the only politician toying with the Wikipedia.
posted on Jan-29-06 at 8:51 AM
Flash Friday. Find the bombs and save the hotel.
posted on Jan-13-06 at 10:09 AM
Why does the Supreme Court Make Justices More Liberal? Does it? If so, why, and why more liberal not more conservative?
posted on Jan-12-06 at 10:04 AM
FRVADE Is this really the hardest game on the internets? (via Grow-a-Brain)
posted on Jan-11-06 at 7:09 AM
Grandiloquent Dictionary For all the logophiles. Not intended for those afflicted with ultracrepidarianism or logorrhea.
posted on Jan-9-06 at 7:59 AM
Flash Friday. Several little amusements which are short enough not to wreck your whole work day (sorry about that). Help the boy, Mr. Zhong and the mouse in their endeavors.
posted on Jan-6-06 at 7:33 AM
Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees...
posted on Dec-30-05 at 1:31 PM
This apartment is so cramped. I wish I could find a little extra space.
posted on Dec-26-05 at 9:30 AM
Opium
posted on Dec-20-05 at 11:41 PM
A Dictionary of Amercanisms by John Russell Bartlett, published 1848. A "vocabulary of the colloquial language of the United States" during the mid-19th century. As noted by jmorrison at the nonist (the source for this link), it is interesting to see much of what we find so common today " called out as 'americanisms' not yet included in the dictionary." The site has other goodies too, such as The Slave's Friend, a Christian anti-slavery tract, and Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America, by John Dunn Hunter, published in 1823 and 1824 and recounting his life after being captured as a young boy and raised by Native American tribes. It provides an intimate, inside look at their societies, customs and battles.
posted on Dec-17-05 at 3:09 PM
Fallen Fruit. you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field...you shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. Lev. 19 Fallen Fruit took root when CalArts professor Matias Viegener discovered an old city law declaring that all fruit growing on branches that overhang into public property is free for the taking, even if the trunk of that tree is in private domain.
posted on Dec-16-05 at 12:11 PM
Rescued from rape and slavery - brought to you by the CIA. Also, the Atomic Revolution and AA. From Ethan Persoff who brought us Teddy.
posted on Dec-15-05 at 11:49 AM
Snowplowing. Too much seriousness here on the blue today. We need something fun. Since it is snowing where I am, a flash snowplowing game it is.
posted on Dec-6-05 at 10:21 AM
The year in lists. Best albums, Top 100 DJs, 100 Notable Books, the list goes on. Lists from 2004 also.
posted on Dec-2-05 at 1:07 PM
What is it? A collection of mystery photos where you try to figure out what these strange objects are. via Grow-a-Brain
posted on Nov-23-05 at 7:07 AM
Bush in the bunker. [this link takes you directly to the article, but will call up the print dialog] In a story seemingly out of Capital Hill Blue, sources say that "Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions."
posted on Nov-15-05 at 12:50 PM
Tax and Spend Conservatives. President George W. Bush and the current administration have now borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 U.S. presidents combined. Wow.
posted on Nov-9-05 at 6:17 PM
These are the people in my neighborhood. Oh they treat me good, since I left Hollywood. Come meet the people in my neighborhood. They're conservatives that I call for anything at all. [brought to you by the letter M]
posted on Nov-3-05 at 5:57 PM
posted on Aug-5-06 at 4:39 PM
Design Lab 2006 (flash and sound) Are you a college student with an eye toward design? Design a cool appliance and win 5,000 Euros. For the rest of us there are previous winners, such as this airwash waterless washing machine.
posted on Aug-2-06 at 4:34 PM
What's playing? What songs are playing on the radio right now and where, an interactive map. Less fun, but much more useful is the site's ability to look up a station and tell you what songs they recently played. (via J-Walk)
posted on Aug-1-06 at 8:42 AM
Top 100 Music Videos, according to Stylus. Last month Pitchfork made their pitch for a hundred awesome music videos. This month it's Stylus's turn.
posted on Jul-22-06 at 8:16 PM
Safe at Any Speed With higher speed limits, our highways have been getting safer.
posted on Jul-21-06 at 11:00 AM
50 Albums that changed music. Fifty years old this month, the album chart has tracked the history of pop. But only a select few records have actually altered the course of music.
posted on Jul-19-06 at 8:47 AM
The rhythm method kills more embryos than condoms. Some proponents of the pro-life movement argue against morning after pills, IUDs, and contraceptive pills on grounds of a concern for causing embryonic death. What has gone unnoticed, however, is that the pro-life line of argumentation can be extended to the rhythm method of contraception as well. Given certain plausible empirical assumptions, the rhythm method may well be responsible for a much higher number of embryonic deaths than some other contraceptive techniques.
posted on Jul-18-06 at 8:13 AM
Brooklyn (via Grow a Brain)
posted on Jul-16-06 at 9:37 PM
We all have to go sometime. Frank Russo has an obsession, dead ballplayers. Some died in accidents, some were murdered, some couldn't take it anymore, and some were cursed. They were all human. (via HNT)
posted on Jul-9-06 at 1:45 PM
Reverse Color Blindness Test "normal vision humans have a lower degree of color contrast detection in the red spectrum. A colorblind person shouldn't be burdened by that lowered contrast sensitivity and should be able to see the object immediately by picking out the change in contrast at the objects edges" A small oddity that takes but a few seconds of time. (via The Presurfer)
posted on Jun-28-06 at 8:14 PM
Radio streams on the net. A huge compendium of radio stations around the globe which have internet feeds.
posted on Jun-14-06 at 10:08 AM
Princeton Salutatorian - Undocumented Immigrant. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Princeton '06, has achieved many academic honors. He is also in the US illegally. He has now spoken out. "[A] former roommate of mine wrote that illegal immigrants constitute a drain on American resources and a threat to the jobs of native American workers; that they are intentional law-breakers who should not receive considerate treatment from the government; and that existing laws concerning illegal immigrants should be rigidly and more consistently enforced, even if this results in behavior that could be characterized as inhumane. I was taken aback by his words, but they provided me with the impetus to speak out and emphasize the inhumanity of such a perspective as well as the misinformation it is based upon."
posted on Jun-10-06 at 5:11 AM
Xenu's chariot. Gentlemen,
posted on Jun-8-06 at 12:41 PM
THE EVOLUTION OF THE JUST WAR TRADITION: DEFINING JUS POST BELLUM For nearly two thousand years, the just war tradition has provided critical moral guidance on the initiation of war and on conduct during warfare. Today, the tradition must evolve to analyze and develop criteria to apply to jus post bellum.
posted on Jun-1-06 at 1:44 PM
Rosie O'Donnell - Flickr
posted on Apr-28-06 at 8:05 PM
Abraham Lincoln, duelist? Hamilton and Burr were not the only prominent duelists in US history. In the early morning hours of September 22, 1842, a young Abraham Lincoln crossed the Mississippi River at Alton, IL on his way to a small island where he would engage in mortal combat with a political adversary. Lincoln had used his sarcastic wit to write anonymous letters to the editor lampooning a political rival, James Shields. Some of his friends joined in and perhaps went a little too far, including suggestions of Shields' inadequacies with the ladies. One of these friends included Lincoln's future wife, Mary Todd. Shields demanded a duel and Lincoln defined the parameters of the duel - broadswords in a pit.
posted on Apr-24-06 at 4:16 PM
Antique Spectacles David Fleishman, M.D., a retired ophthalmologist, has compiled a rather extensive collection of information about spectacles and their importance in history. In addition to many examples of early spectacles and information about the spectacles worn by figures in history, there is a general history - Eyeglasses Through the Ages:[R]eading glasses are one of the most important inventions of the past 2000 years.... No one really knows about the early history of image magnification. In ancient times, someone noticed that convex-shaped glass magnified images. Sometime between the year 1000 and 1250 crude technology began to develop regarding reading stones (simple magnifiers). English Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon (1220 -1292), in his 1268 ‘Opus Majus’, noted that letters could be seen better and larger when viewed through less than half a sphere of glass. Bacon's experiments confirmed the principle of the convex (converging) lens, described by Alhazen (965-1038) Arabian mathematician, optician and astronomer at Cairo, and even earlier by the Greeks. (via the dead tree version of the WSJ)
posted on Apr-6-06 at 9:13 AM
Who's having some fun today?
posted on Apr-1-06 at 6:39 AM
A vessel to fill with mirth. Drinking vessels from days of yore, including Lord Byron's skull cup, a fuddling cup, a black jack (leather cup), a pot crown ( a precursor to the beer helmet?), and a whistle cup. The site contains lots of other wine history as well. Ah, but they didn't have lover's cups back then. (via Cynical-C)
posted on Mar-24-06 at 8:47 AM
Things we already knew: Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. ... A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.
posted on Mar-22-06 at 3:19 PM
Waste some time on a lazy Sunday with Monty Python's Silly Walks Generator.
posted on Mar-12-06 at 9:28 AM
US Troop poll results in: 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately. In other news, 58% of Americans think the troops should stay. Back to the troops: 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”
posted on Feb-28-06 at 12:15 PM
An ambitious time capsule. In the basement of Phoebe Hearst Hall at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, there is a stainless steel vault door which was welded shut over sixty five years ago. Behind this door lies a 20' x 10' waterproofed room containing a menagerie of once-modern artifacts and microfilm records, placed there by men and women in the years between 1937 and 1940. If their goal is realized, the contents of this vault will remain unseen and undisturbed for the next 6,107 years. Official site, pictures, and inventory. (link lovingly pilfered from another filter)
posted on Feb-23-06 at 12:59 PM
Gore in '08? Several weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore told the Associated Press that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 2008.” His words were eerily reminiscent of a quote from another former Vice President, Richard Nixon, who told the same Associated Press in November of 1965 that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 1968.”
posted on Feb-22-06 at 9:57 AM
A lapsed neocon speaks out: The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them.... After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." ... We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.
posted on Feb-18-06 at 10:43 PM
Let's go quail hunting. (flash) Don't drink too much. We all had a good laugh over the Dick Cheney Quail Hunting game (Deadeye Dick sure is quite a shooter), but here you actually get to shoot some quail. (my apologies to PETA and Harry Whittington) Sorry, but this will only waste about five minutes of your time this Friday.
posted on Feb-17-06 at 7:42 AM
Witches. Who they are, how to tell, what to do. One example.
posted on Feb-11-06 at 9:20 AM
Real Estate Value + Google Maps Fly around a neighborhood with Google maps and see not only the houses but what they are worth. Click on an individual house for recent selling information, house details, tax assessments etc., all for free and no strings attached.
posted on Feb-10-06 at 4:54 AM
Was Gonzales truthful? Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said. So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.
posted on Feb-8-06 at 10:47 PM
Motown history traded for Super Bowl parking. (mostly audio) The Motown Center in Detroit was torn down a few weeks ago and turned into Super Bowl parking. Although not the main recording studios, and long abandoned, it still contained many Motown documents and memorabilia, most of which were lost in the razing. Covered by local bloggers: dETROITfUNK (1, 2) , Detroit Blog (1, 2, 3, 4), and Kempa, plus local tv.
posted on Feb-6-06 at 8:08 PM
Surreptitious cell phone
posted on Feb-4-06 at 6:29 AM
Dumb Moments. Post your embarrassing moments and cringe at those of others. Related Doctor moments here.
posted on Feb-1-06 at 9:19 AM
Now, even congressmen get in on abusing Wikipedia. Marty Meehan's staffers admit editing out negative information about the congressman from his Wikipedia entry. According to the article, Rep. Meehan is not the only politician toying with the Wikipedia.
posted on Jan-29-06 at 8:51 AM
Flash Friday. Find the bombs and save the hotel.
posted on Jan-13-06 at 10:09 AM
Why does the Supreme Court Make Justices More Liberal? Does it? If so, why, and why more liberal not more conservative?
posted on Jan-12-06 at 10:04 AM
FRVADE Is this really the hardest game on the internets? (via Grow-a-Brain)
posted on Jan-11-06 at 7:09 AM
Grandiloquent Dictionary For all the logophiles. Not intended for those afflicted with ultracrepidarianism or logorrhea.
posted on Jan-9-06 at 7:59 AM
Flash Friday. Several little amusements which are short enough not to wreck your whole work day (sorry about that). Help the boy, Mr. Zhong and the mouse in their endeavors.
posted on Jan-6-06 at 7:33 AM
Strange Fruit
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees...
posted on Dec-30-05 at 1:31 PM
This apartment is so cramped. I wish I could find a little extra space.
posted on Dec-26-05 at 9:30 AM
Opium
posted on Dec-20-05 at 11:41 PM
A Dictionary of Amercanisms by John Russell Bartlett, published 1848. A "vocabulary of the colloquial language of the United States" during the mid-19th century. As noted by jmorrison at the nonist (the source for this link), it is interesting to see much of what we find so common today " called out as 'americanisms' not yet included in the dictionary." The site has other goodies too, such as The Slave's Friend, a Christian anti-slavery tract, and Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America, by John Dunn Hunter, published in 1823 and 1824 and recounting his life after being captured as a young boy and raised by Native American tribes. It provides an intimate, inside look at their societies, customs and battles.
posted on Dec-17-05 at 3:09 PM
Fallen Fruit. you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field...you shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. Lev. 19 Fallen Fruit took root when CalArts professor Matias Viegener discovered an old city law declaring that all fruit growing on branches that overhang into public property is free for the taking, even if the trunk of that tree is in private domain.
posted on Dec-16-05 at 12:11 PM
Rescued from rape and slavery - brought to you by the CIA. Also, the Atomic Revolution and AA. From Ethan Persoff who brought us Teddy.
posted on Dec-15-05 at 11:49 AM
Snowplowing. Too much seriousness here on the blue today. We need something fun. Since it is snowing where I am, a flash snowplowing game it is.
posted on Dec-6-05 at 10:21 AM
The year in lists. Best albums, Top 100 DJs, 100 Notable Books, the list goes on. Lists from 2004 also.
posted on Dec-2-05 at 1:07 PM
What is it? A collection of mystery photos where you try to figure out what these strange objects are. via Grow-a-Brain
posted on Nov-23-05 at 7:07 AM
Bush in the bunker. [this link takes you directly to the article, but will call up the print dialog] In a story seemingly out of Capital Hill Blue, sources say that "Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions."
posted on Nov-15-05 at 12:50 PM
Tax and Spend Conservatives. President George W. Bush and the current administration have now borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 U.S. presidents combined. Wow.
posted on Nov-9-05 at 6:17 PM
These are the people in my neighborhood. Oh they treat me good, since I left Hollywood. Come meet the people in my neighborhood. They're conservatives that I call for anything at all. [brought to you by the letter M]
posted on Nov-3-05 at 5:57 PM
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