Metafilter "dot threads": threads containing at least one comment consisting solely of a single "." character.
August 23, 2007
who died yesterday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84.
posted by jokeefe
at 10:33 AM - 17 comments
August 21, 2007
August 20, 2007
As part of the
Adam Walsh Child Safety and Protection Act (Sec. 503, p. 51), the "Department of Justice wants to come up with an official list of every porn star in America - and slap stiff penalties on producers who don't cooperate." Is this an effective way to make sure porn movie producers don't hire underage actors, or is this, as Paul Cambria alleges, a violation of first amendment rights?
posted by John of Michigan
at 8:23 PM - 153 comments
August 16, 2007
Max Roach has
passed at age 83. The famed drum innovator, composer and educator who came to prominence during the bebop era died last evening at age 83 at home in Manhattan. Known as the pioneer of a technically complex style that allowed for far greater improvisational texture, Max was one of the first drummers to step out from the role as mere timekeeper. His imprint on both the history of jazz and the history of music is indelible.
posted by nonreflectiveobject
at 12:10 PM - 53 comments
hit Peru in the Ica region, south of the capital of Lima. Ica, Chincha and Pisco have been hardest hit, although the pavement rippled in downtown Lima as well. BBC (first link) and
CNN have been reporting about 336-7 dead, but my uncle (in Lima) says that many towns south of San Bartolo have simply disappeared into rubble.
posted by LMGM
at 8:08 AM - 27 comments
August 15, 2007
The
largest democracy in the world celebrates its
60th anniversary, in a year which saw
horrendous floods, the election of its
first woman president (previously mentioned
here), the signing of the
123 Nuclear Agreement, and the recent victory over England after a span of
21 years.
posted by hadjiboy
at 12:03 AM - 23 comments
August 14, 2007
August 13, 2007
OBITUARIES
Dunn, Nicholas Ryan. August 5, 2007.
"Yesterday my son took his own life. He did not intend to. He did something thousands of people have and are doing, using drugs. Drugs they know nothing about. Drugs recommended and provided by friends or strangers that are not chemists that know what's in them or doctors that knew how much his body could take. My son Nick has devastated us . We also all hurt for a
three year old little girl named Kylie Marie who will grow up without her father . Those drugs do not discriminate by race, income, the status of you or of your family. These are those who care about you and those who you care about. Consider them, please! The pleasure is not worth the risks! Goodbye Nick, we love you, and will miss you."
posted by pardonyou?
at 2:09 PM - 119 comments
August 12, 2007
a New York
painter who reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself, died yesterday at her home in upstate New York.
(Images)
posted by R. Mutt
at 8:19 PM - 7 comments
Happy
Vinyl Record Day, everyone. On this date in 1877, Edison invented the phonograph. To commemorate the date, a blogswarm of 22 of the best vinyl sharity blogs out there have come together to celebrate the legacy of the dominant recorded music format of the 20th century, led by jb of
The Hits Just Keep On Comin' and featuring
Flea Market Funk, Echoes in the Wind,
Funky 16 Corners,
Davewillieradio,
Good Rockin' Tonight,
Py Korry,
It's Great Shakes, (
bonus!),
Ickmusic,
Jefitoblog,
FuFu (
bonus!),
Lost in the 80's,
Three-Sixty-Five 45s,
Underground Vault of Records,
AM then FM,
The "B" Side,
In Dangerous Rythm (
bonus 1,
bonus 2),
You Must Be From Away, Got The Fever,
Retro Remixes,
Bloggerythms and finally
The Stepfather of Soul.
posted by jonson
at 7:39 PM - 34 comments
August 10, 2007
Her face was beaten, nose broken, teeth loosened, and she'd been shot through the left side of her head. A trail of blood was found nearby, and the tent appeared to be partly burned. The Army ruled it a suicide.
Bloggers were doubtful. The Johnson family asked that
the remains be disinterred and a better investigation launched. Meanwhile, the internet
pushes back.
posted by toma
at 2:54 AM - 37 comments
August 7, 2007
August 6, 2007
August 5, 2007
August 4, 2007
August 3, 2007
August 2, 2007
August 1, 2007
The bridge, one of the most heavily traveled freeway bridges in the Twin Cities metro area, collapsed around 6:05 this evening. Sections of the freeway are said to be floating in the Mississippi as cars are stranded on standing portions of the bridge.
Slideshow of images.
Real-time updates at MPR.
posted by baphomet
at 5:27 PM - 310 comments
July 31, 2007
Walsh, former coach of the
San Francisco 49er's (cool tribute up on their site, currently), lost his fight with Leukemia yesterday. His career included an impressive 6 division titles and 3 super bowl wins, and his inventions included many tactics and devices still being used by many teams today, including the
West Coast Offense and those laminated play cards you see many coaches using. He was also the creator of the
Minority Coaching Fellowship program,
helping minority coaches get a foothold in a previously white-dominated profession. RIP, Bill.
posted by allkindsoftime
at 8:49 AM - 19 comments
What are you doing? Stop it! Stop it! Give me those pictures. You can't photograph people like that.
Who says I can't? I'm only doing my job. Some people are bullfighters, some people are politicians. I'm a photographer.
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912 -
2007.
posted by feelinglistless
at 6:10 AM - 52 comments
July 30, 2007
July 29, 2007
July 27, 2007
July 26, 2007
On October 26, 1965, a sixteen-year-old girl named
Sylvia Marie Likens was reported dead to Indianapolis police. It was soon discovered that
her death was the culmination of weeks of torture at the hands of an adult caretaker and several neighborhood children; when the case went to trial, the prosecutor declared it
"the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana." In 2007, not one but two films inspired by the case make their debut:
The Girl Next Door (
trailer), based on a
fictionalized version of the events, and the docudrama
An American Crime (
trailer). One person, at least, will probably be skipping both -- the victim's sister, who says of the latter film,
"No one ever even asked us about it. It's their gain, our pain."
posted by kittens for breakfast
at 7:32 PM - 118 comments
Four endangered gorillas
were found shot dead in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a conservation group announced today.
For all the evil bastards that do this, there are many, many more
good people fighting the good fight to help keep gorillas healthy.
One, even has a
blog.
posted by james_cpi
at 9:21 AM - 41 comments
July 24, 2007
Thick, black oil dripped from lampposts, splattered across suburban lawns and crept into
Burrard Inlet after a geyser of crude spewed from a burst Kinder Morgan pipeline Tuesday.
[google news]
Work crews ripped into the
TransMountain pipeline about 12:30 p.m., causing the oil to "explode," as one witness put it, from the ground and burble up from manholes, pouring down streets toward the ocean, according to witnesses.
Kinder Morgan bought the pipeline from a Canadian utility in 2005, and is known as a
"poster child for pipeline problems."
More
Kinder Morgan accidents.
posted by KokuRyu
at 5:43 PM - 38 comments
July 22, 2007
July 21, 2007
The art world is
buzzing about the seeming suicide-by-water of video installation artist Jeremy Blake. The
perfume blogs are fizzing with sadness over the death of Theresa Duncan, whose suicide preceded Blake's. The cops are not releasing the notes left by the late,
pretty people, but a clue might be found in the
paranoiac screed Duncan posted on her blog in May, in which Blake's ex-girlfriend, the CIA, FBI, Church of Scientology, Jeff Gannon, bloated plutocrats and many other bugbears of the
psy-ops crowd were put on Duncan's mental merry-go-round and given a real strong spin.
posted by Scram
at 9:37 AM - 37 comments
July 14, 2007
In honor of the 8th Anniversary of MetaFilter, here are 8 YouTube links to...
CAT SCANS
Oh, what heck, here are 8 more...
LOL SCANS
posted by wendell
at 12:00 AM - 23 comments
July 13, 2007
July 11, 2007
July 10, 2007
July 9, 2007
single link newsfilter FPP: (hopefully not a DP!)
She did it! (
cache) Deborah Jean Palfrey (aka the DC Madam) has released the phone records. Get them before they disappear!
posted by krash2fast
at 6:40 PM - 217 comments
July 8, 2007
...Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning. The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives. What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries...
Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity
Research Links Childhood Lead Exposure to Changes in Violent Crime Rates Throughout the 20th Century (
PDF)
posted by y2karl
at 3:14 PM - 56 comments
July 6, 2007
7/7/7
marks the 100th birthday of
Grandmaster Robert Anson Heinlein, born July 7th 1907. Long live
Lazarus Long!
While
any attempt at
a tribute would but naturally turn into a
passionate link infested paean to this
visionary genius, one of the Big 3, along with Asimov and Clarke, one
must honour his contribution with a pointer to the
Heinlein Concordance, a portal of his stories, characters, concepts and timelines.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. ~ Robert A. Heinlein 1907 - 1988
posted by infini
at 10:35 PM - 93 comments
July 5, 2007
Frank Zappa - The Gigantic Spoken Word Project. Numerous volumes of a very large collection of Frank Zappa spoken word releases.
They consist of radio interviews and journalist reporter type personal interviews. During the radio interviews sometimes music was played as background or added before the broadcast in between questions and answers. Sometimes FZ acts as D.J., plays records from his collection and talks to the radio audience. But the main focus of this series is FZ interviews which to me is as interesting as his music. (Just a quick warning; the download mechanism is a tad annoying)
posted by KevinSkomsvold
at 9:20 PM - 6 comments
"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."
posted by Gamblor
at 11:40 AM - 78 comments
July 4, 2007
July 3, 2007
is a kinetic sculpture with 8 synchronized catapults, 160 plastic balls per minute are launched, caught, and recirculated. Made mostly of wood, the work is ~36 inches in diameter. It was designed and built on commission by
Bradley N. Litwin, a vocalist and guitar player whose repertoire includes 1920's and 1930's vintage blues, stride and ragtime
posted by growabrain
at 7:42 PM - 35 comments
July 2, 2007
June 29, 2007
June 28, 2007
In late March the body of
Lindsay Ann Hawker was
found in a bathtub on the balcony of a Chiba apartment. This week, with the
help of UK officers, the Hawker family has
returned to Tokyo, to seek help to find the main suspect Tatsuya Ichihashi, who has been missing since the discovery of the body.
posted by gomichild
at 9:49 AM - 48 comments
On June 13th Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich.,
issued subpoenas to two former White House officials compelling them to provide testimony and related information as part of ongoing congressional investigations into the mass firings of well-performing federal prosecutors and the politicization of hiring and firing within the Department of Justice. Today is the deadline for handing over the requested information and the Whitehouse has stated that
it will not be complying with the request.
posted by Mr_Zero
at 7:18 AM - 105 comments
June 25, 2007
June 23, 2007
June 20, 2007
Return to Crothersville:
Aaron Hall probably wasn't gay, but
his murder in April has become an argument for passage of the
Matthew Shepard Act, which would add attacks based on a victim's perceived sexual orientation to the list of federal hate crimes. The men accused of Aaron's murder are invoking the
"gay panic" defense. A citizen journalist at the Bloomington Alternative has published
a
fascinating article on her investigation of the circumstances of the crime and of Aaron's life, and why uncovering the truth in a place like Crothersville, where the social network is so tight-knit and there's
no local hate crimes law, requires an outside (federal) investigation.
posted by thirteenkiller
at 10:45 AM - 168 comments
June 18, 2007
June 13, 2007
June 12, 2007
Better known as Mr. Wizard, you taught several generations basic science and a love of experimentation. You will be missed.
Sorry for the one-link ObitFilter
posted by JMOZ
at 4:16 PM - 103 comments
cartoonist and architect Earl Ma
passed away this week after a three year battle with cancer. But you would never have known it from how he lived his life. Last month, he refused to let his partial paralysis keep him away from the Indianapolis 500 (though fellow Hawaiian
Jim Nabors was too ill to attend), and with the help of friends
covered the race from his wheelchair. His boundless energy, generosity and wide range of talents earned him many friends and admirers, and he is already greatly missed.
posted by Scram
at 11:43 AM - 2 comments
June 11, 2007
June 10, 2007
From the Simpsons episode "
Lisa the Vegetarian," one small Ralph Wiggum line that's sparked some big debate on the internet. Does Ralph use "Viking" to mean "One who excels"? Or does Ralph dream of being a Scandinavian warrior? Not content to
keep it online, people are calling
radio shows (June 5th's episode, around the 49 minute mark) to gain support for their opinion. Perhaps only the show's writer,
David Cohen, can settle this.
posted by Greg Nog
at 7:06 AM - 467 comments
June 9, 2007
June 4, 2007
NewsFilter:
Sen. Craig Thomas (R-WY) has died. He had been receiving chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia. Wyoming's Democratic Governor will appoint a successor from one of three finalists chosen by the state Republican party.
posted by pruner
at 8:03 PM - 55 comments
June 3, 2007
May 29, 2007
May 28, 2007
Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
posted by geos
at 7:14 AM - 126 comments
May 27, 2007
Charles Nelson Reilly (1931-2007) If, in 1940, you had a lobotomized aunt, an institutionalized father, a racist mother, and were the only gay kid on the block, what do you think the odds would be that you'd end up a Tony winner, a staple of television, and a generational icon? (contains YouTube links)
posted by LinusMines
at 10:28 PM - 90 comments
Swamp rock progenitor, Vietnam and Iraq War opposer,
40th greatest guitarist of all time, and performer at
Woodstock, John Fogerty turns 62 tomorrow. Prolific singer, guitarist and composer extraordinaire with Creedence Clearwater Revival on such hits as
Have you Ever Seen the Rain?,
Who.ll Stop the Rain?,
Bad Moon Rising/Proud Mary,
Born on the Bayou,
Green River,
Travellin. Band, Whitfield and Strong's Motown classic
I Heard it Through the Grapevine,
Susie Q, and last but not least,
Fortunate Son, a song whose message has again become so timely, more than a handful of prominent musicians have covered it over the few years, including
Pearl Jam, Sleater-Kinney,
the Circle Jerks, Bob Seger, Sublime,
Ivan Neville,
Brandi Carlile and
.38 Special. As a solo artist, Fogerty also penned such hits as
Centerfield, a song purported to be one of George W. Bush's favorites (to Fogerty's apparent amusement), and
The Old Man Down the Road.
posted by psmealey
at 12:17 PM - 75 comments
May 26, 2007
May 25, 2007
May 24, 2007
hooks up women who want breast implants with benefactors who want to help them pay for their breast implants.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero
at 3:51 PM - 63 comments
May 22, 2007
Slobodan Milosevic has died. Again. I'm sure everyone in the vampire community will miss him - whatever your personal feelings about him, there's no denying his contributions to bloodsucking. Truly a Yugoslavian icon.
posted by Krrrlson
at 10:28 AM - 50 comments
May 21, 2007
"I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was
irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.
Indigenous cuisines offer clues about what humans, naturally omnivorous, need to survive, reproduce and grow: traditional vegetarian diets, as in India, invariably include dairy and eggs for complete protein, essential fats and vitamins. There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a
vegan diet is not adequate in the long run."
posted by four panels
at 8:34 AM - 312 comments
May 20, 2007
The
Cutty Sark burns. Nineteenth century tea clipper, preserved as a museum-ship in Greenwich since the fifties, is currently ablaze.
posted by hydatius
at 10:58 PM - 48 comments
May 19, 2007
May 18, 2007
Bombs exploded outside the
Mecca Masjid today as people were offering their Friday Prayers. Out of the more than 8,000 worshippers present, a total of 12 have been reported dead, and 50 injured. Also, this comes in the wake of the violence that has been taking place in the State of
Punjab.
posted by hadjiboy
at 10:45 AM - 34 comments
May 16, 2007
May 15, 2007
Founded in Berkeley by artist
Jim Mason,
The Shipyard, a collaborative industrial arts space constructed from recycled shipping containers, has hosted numerous large-scale projects and events including a
Survival Research Labs show,
Power Tool Drag Races,
gassification experiments and workshops, and various large-scale Burning Man projects such as 2005's
Clockworks. Short documentary
here (quicktime). However, relations with the city of Berkeley have been consistently
tense. Recently, the city shut off the Shipyard's power, to which the Shipyard responded by going
off grid. On May 8, Berkeley issued 3-day vacate and abate notice, with which the Shipyard is
attempting to
comply (auto-playing video).
posted by treepour
at 10:06 AM - 8 comments
May 14, 2007
JPG Magazine. Heather writes:
"8020 has decided to rewrite the history of how JPG came into being, removing the original six issues from the site, and any mention of Derek and [me]."
posted by Dave Faris
at 8:44 PM - 214 comments
May 11, 2007
May 10, 2007
Down to 65 pounds and unable to continue treatment
for cancer, Tammy Faye Messner, one of the most colorful figures in
religious broadcasting, has posted a goodbye letter to fans on her Web
site.
posted by parmanparman
at 3:09 PM - 139 comments
May 9, 2007
warning: sound, animated gifs, frontpage-1.0-ish
posted by Stynxno
at 12:29 PM - 65 comments
May 8, 2007
May 7, 2007
Goodbye everyone, Since there has been discussion regarding whether or not my posts to this community are relevant, I have decided to no longer post here. I've enjoyed my time here...meeting a lot of you, but I simply find this community's rules too restrictive, and since I write what I feel, without regard to content (Is it sexist? Is it parental? Is it political? Is it, God forbid, all three??), this community will only end up stifling my originality, and I have no intentions of letting myself be censored in this way. i hope you fall off your soap box someday and bust your ass.
i'm out of here. i am not sad about it either.
posted by absalom
at 7:34 PM - 120 comments
A photo essay from Slate:
On this day in 1984, a $180 million out-of-court settlement was announced in the Agent Orange class-action suit brought by Vietnam veterans, who argued that exposure to AO had caused various cancers, birth defects, and other chronic diseases. The settlement came to government benefits of about $1,500 a month until 1997. Yet many Vietnamese victims who also suffer greatly have received nothing from the United States since the end of the war.
Some images are quite graphic and not something you want to look at while eating lunch or possibly at work. I know we've done Agent Orange before (
here
and
here), but this collection of images is rather intense.
posted by otherwordlyglow
at 1:14 PM - 23 comments
May 6, 2007
May 5, 2007
May 4, 2007
May 3, 2007
May 2, 2007
Everybody give it up for one of America's finest comedic talents...
posted by lilboo
at 8:24 AM - 51 comments
May 1, 2007
Third and final part of an excellent series of unpublished interviews with Douglas Adams, with the first Hitchhiker's book still to be complete and script editing on Dr Who taking up much of his time.
posted by humuhumu
at 1:16 PM - 6 comments
Law Day is an opportunity to celebrate the Constitution and the laws that protect our rights and liberties and to recognize our responsibility as citizens to uphold the values of a free and just society. (
Law Day 2007)
posted by caddis
at 7:28 AM - 53 comments
April 27, 2007
Master cellist and renowned conductor, Rostropovich was one of the great artistic dissidents of the Soviet Union. He started his career as a star of the Moscow Conservatory and lived long enough to play his cello in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. More from the
Associated Press and
Wikipedia.
posted by ardgedee
at 4:21 AM - 38 comments
April 26, 2007
The US Senate has voted to approve a bill which requires US troops to be withdrawn from Iraq within 11 months.
posted by chunking express
at 11:15 AM - 133 comments
April 25, 2007
April 24, 2007
Roger Ebert is determined to attend his
Overlooked Film Festival tomorrow.
We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I'm not going to miss my festival.
[via]
posted by kirkaracha
at 11:30 AM - 124 comments
April 23, 2007
--
...more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website -- which gave the world the presidential election results -- was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors. ...
posted by amberglow
at 7:44 PM - 66 comments
Experienced, eloquent, and always observant (his
dim view of Patrick Ewing being a notable exception), David Halberstam was a journalistic jack-of-all-trades who was probably best known for his stinging indictment of
Vietnam warrior
Robert McNamara,
JFK and
LBJ's secretary of defense, in the classic
The Best and the Brightest. A superior
war correspondent before the era
of
CNN-televised revolutions , Halberstam was also an excellent historian and sports writer. Halberstam's dense but
illuminating
The Fifties is an informative and tightly written study on the
Eisenhower era. And
The Children offers a compelling look at eight young leaders of the Civil Rights Revolution.
Moreover, Halberstam's many writings on
basketball (
The Breaks of the Game,
Playing for Keeps) and baseball (
Summer of '49,
October 1964) rank among the upper
echelon of sports books.
posted by psmealey
at 5:02 PM - 54 comments
Yeltsin said: "I want to beg forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. And also I would like to beg forgiveness not to have justified your hopes."
Boris Yeltsin is dead. [
AP story]
posted by nickyskye
at 7:54 AM - 58 comments
April 22, 2007
April 20, 2007
April 18, 2007
Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito was a tireless anti-nuclear proliferation activist who travelled the world to spread his pacifist message and help serve witness to the horrors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His comments during bombing anniversaries have criticized the United States as well as North Korea and Iran for contributing to proliferation.
posted by stagewhisper
at 7:45 PM - 20 comments
in a 5-4 decision. The
federal ban provides no exceptions for the health of the mother, the reason previous Courts overturned the law. Justice Kennedy
argued the law banning the procedure should stay, as opponents "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases." In a scathing dissent, Justice Ginsburg alluded to the politics of recent judicial appointments, noting "...the Court's defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court -- and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power."
posted by XQUZYPHYR
at 7:57 AM - 219 comments
April 17, 2007
April 16, 2007
April 14, 2007
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in
the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. [pdf]
via NPR
posted by bigmusic
at 9:02 PM - 145 comments
April 13, 2007
April 11, 2007
(news/outragefilter):
BBC reports that the new appraisal forms for Indian civil service employees require women to disclose information about their menstrual histories and any pregnancy leave.
posted by aberrant
at 8:18 PM - 25 comments
"His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.
Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and .70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States."
.
posted by landedjentry
at 8:10 PM - 616 comments
The head of the International Red Cross in Tehran, Peter Stoeker, says he saw wounds on an Iranian diplomat who has alleged that US forces in Iraq tortured him. There were marks on Jalal Sharafi's feet, legs, back and nose. [
photos].
On 4 February soldiers from the Iraqi army 36th Commando battalion in Baghdad, considered to be under American control, had seized Jalal Sharafi, while he was
carrying a videogame, a gift for his daughter. Read more about the US secret operations against Iranians in Iraq in
an exclusive report by The Independent.
posted by hoder
at 4:22 PM - 49 comments
April 10, 2007
is no more. Earlier today a fire was sparked amid fumes of a wood preservative and the structure was destroyed. New owner/restorer
Barry Gibb unsure how to be
Mr. Natural now that the Nature House is gone. Warning: Horribly written Tennessean piece.
posted by rhythim
at 4:25 PM - 20 comments
April 9, 2007
April 8, 2007
April 7, 2007
April 5, 2007
At 8 o'clock on a recent Saturday morning, more than 250 men gathered at New Life Christian Church in Morton, Illinois, for a breakfast of porn and pancakes.
posted by theemperorhasnoclotheson
at 8:59 AM - 57 comments
April 4, 2007
"Porky's was about anti-Semitism, about racism, it's not just about boys with erections," claims Clark. He then adds, pun intended, "It was a seminal film." Bob Clark, Director of
two iconic 1980's films that profoundly impacted some of your childhoods (no doubt in decidedly different ways), and his 22 year-old son were in a
fatal car crash on PCH this morning. This was set to be a
promising year for the man who brought
Ralphie and his bunny suit to the world. R.I.P.
posted by miss lynnster
at 5:05 PM - 75 comments
April 3, 2007
April 2, 2007
March 29, 2007
Attendees at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner had some special entertainment, courtesy the President and
MC Rove (YouTube, 4 minutes).
posted by textilephile
at 8:13 AM - 136 comments
March 27, 2007
March 23, 2007
March 21, 2007
March 20, 2007
March 19, 2007
March 17, 2007
March 16, 2007
March 15, 2007
Marine veteran Jonathan Schulze survived the war in Iraq but almost two years after he came home, it ended up killing him, reports The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.
He had one of the toughest jobs in the war: taming the insurgent hotbed of Ramadi in 2004.
posted by Postroad
at 1:14 PM - 59 comments
March 14, 2007
the Islamists will have beaten both of the superpowers -- first the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and now the United States in the
heart of Islam. The impact of that in Islamic civilization is going to be enormous. We have made bin Laden a prophet: His organizing concept for Al Qaeda was "The Russians are a lot tougher than the Americans. If we can beat the Russians, then we can eventually beat the Americans." "
Rolling Stone assembles a panel of military and history experts on the state, and future, of Iraq.
posted by four panels
at 9:51 AM - 113 comments
March 13, 2007
"Families can choreograph their child.s very brief life with their family . . . Sometimes they may have a matter of minutes, so they decide beforehand who can hold the baby, who will cut the umbilical cord, who will hold the baby when you know he is going to die."
posted by brain_drain
at 3:29 PM - 66 comments
The
Stardust Hotel/Casino was
reduced to dust (youtube) at 2:30 am this morning.
Initially opened in 1958 as the first low-budget property on the strip (rooms cost $6 a night), it (and the Westward Ho nearby) has been demolished to make room for a 5,300 room $4B ultra-luxury resort named
Echelon, currently the second most expensive property development in Nevada (behind
Project City Center down the road).
One of the few remaining remnants of old Vegas, it was mob-owned/operated until at least 1984 (when the gaming commission levied a $3M fine for skimming), and is probably best known as the setting for the mostly nonfiction
book/
movie Casino.
Over the years, it could lay claim to having the largest casino, the longest pool, the most rooms (twice), the largest neon sign, the only drive-in theater, the largest fine ever levied by the gaming commission, and the most consecutive live performances by Wayne Newton. It was also one of the last properties on the strip to use the more expensive
metal-centered gaming chips.
Arrivederci.
posted by toxic
at 2:43 PM - 39 comments
Anthony Shadid of the
Washington Post writes about Mohammed Hayawi, "a bald bear of a man," who ran the Renaissance Bookstore on "Baghdad's storied Mutanabi Street." Back in 2005, Phillip Robertson wrote a
Salon article about Al Mutanabbi Street, "Baghdad's legendary literary cafe, the Shabandar, " and Hajji Qais Anni's stationery store: "Hajji Qais had been on Al Mutanabbi street for 10 years and the vendors all knew him... He wore a beard and was also known as a devout Sunni who had no problem hiring Shia workers or spending time with Christian colleagues." Both Hayawi and Hajji Qais were killed by bombs, the cafe has been gutted, and the street that "embodied a generation-old saying: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads" is no longer its old self. "When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, it was said that the Tigris River ran red one day, black another. The red came from the blood of nameless victims, massacred by ferocious horsemen. The black came from the ink of countless books from libraries and universities. Last Monday, the bomb on Mutanabi Street detonated at 11:40 a.m. The pavement was smeared with blood. Fires that ensued sent up columns of dark smoke, fed by the plethora of paper." Two views of a part of Baghdad that doesn't make the news much.
posted by languagehat
at 2:14 PM - 42 comments
March 12, 2007
Every time you hear that people filming themselves doing stupid, dangerous things is a recent trend, consider Austrian tailor
Franz Reichelt. He invented a combination overcoat/parachute, and on February 4, 1912 decided to test it himself by jumping off the Eiffel Tower. It didn't work--and there's
video.
posted by gottabefunky
at 10:25 AM - 38 comments
March 11, 2007
March 9, 2007
Lead singer for the band
Boston , dead at 55. "We've just lost the nicest guy in rock and roll." is all you will find at the band Boston's
website
posted by lobstah
at 5:10 PM - 72 comments
March 8, 2007
March 7, 2007
Marvel kills off Captain America. Obviously this is
Civil War (previous post) fallout, but how long can they honestly expect this to last?
posted by sbrollins
at 9:18 AM - 94 comments
March 6, 2007
March 5, 2007
March 3, 2007
March 2, 2007
February 28, 2007
February 27, 2007
February 26, 2007
February 24, 2007
February 21, 2007
February 20, 2007
NSFW MC Mack, Little ***king Kev and Ginger Joe getting more fame then they could have possibly imagined. More inside...
posted by asok
at 11:08 AM - 42 comments
February 19, 2007
February 17, 2007
February 15, 2007
MacAllister. "Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it.s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.. Founder of
Big Burlesque and Venus Group, she died Feb 13 after a long fight with ovarian cancer. She was notably
photographed by
Leonard Nimoy. Multiple
memorial services are planned for her birthday, Feb 25.
[some links may be NSFW]
posted by cubby
at 6:21 PM - 15 comments
February 14, 2007
An
L.A. Times blog built on the list of homicide victims reported to the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office each week.
posted by docgonzo
at 5:02 PM - 12 comments
February 13, 2007
February 11, 2007
On Friday,
Ian Richardson died in his sleep. He was probably best known in the UK for the BBC "
House of Cards" trilogy starring as the scheming politician Francis Urquhart with his now infamous "You might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment." Busy until his death, he recently featured in the TV series "Midsomer Murders" and played Death in the
Sky One adaptation of Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather". Sadly, to many he was just the guy who asked for Grey Poupon mustard.
posted by twine42
at 7:03 AM - 30 comments
February 10, 2007
Ever wanted to see what a dead whale looks like? Find it here. How about multiple great white sharks feeding on said carcass? Find it here. How about a mad scientist who climbs on said carcass? And films said sharks with fricken' lazer beams feeding on stinking whale carcass?
posted by KokuRyu
at 9:26 AM - 39 comments
February 9, 2007
February 8, 2007
February 6, 2007
Long supressed by the occupying U.S. forces, a highly unsettling (and decidedly NSFW) collection of photos from the days immediately after August 6th.
Via.
posted by jonson
at 6:41 PM - 199 comments
February 3, 2007
February 2, 2007
was, until his death at 95, the most often-performed contemporary opera composer. Among his
works is the first opera composed for
radio, the most popular
Christmas opera, possibly the first opera in which a
telephone plays a principal role (
Poulenc's came more than a decade later), an opera about
aliens, and a
masterpiece about life under totalitarian rule (which was also the first time that suicide by gas oven made it to the stage). He ignored the fashion of atonality that held academia in thrall, and never veered from his lyrical style. He wrote his own libretti, which showed a mastery and love of language as deep as his musical talents. Some of his
works were Broadway successes. And he created one of the
finest music
festivals [includes embedded music video]. He will be
remembered.
posted by QuietDesperation
at 9:56 PM - 4 comments
February 1, 2007
"I'm bleeding. You can check my underwear. I want to go to the hospital."
"How is that my problem?"
[MoralOutrageFilter] Despite Sofia Silva's
telling the officers that she was having a miscarriage [links to video], she was refused medical attention and arrested on traffic violations and outstanding warrants (
mistreatment of children and trespassing). The next day, the baby died after being born prematurely. Sofia is now
suing the Kansas City Police Department.
posted by eunoia
at 4:16 PM - 74 comments
January 31, 2007
January 29, 2007
January 27, 2007
January 25, 2007
(nsfw, youtube, two minutes of your life you can't have back)
posted by bardic
at 4:07 PM - 41 comments
January 24, 2007
(PosEn - NegEn)(NT)^i = R
PosEn is your positivity, positive emotions, positive ego
honesty, love, friendship, etc
NegEn is your negative emotions & energy & ego
hate, fear, jealousy, envy
N is network (virtual, personal, spiritual)
T is time
i is ideas and indivituality
R is results
the only thing you cant make more of is time
posted by nervousfritz
at 11:14 PM - 26 comments
January 23, 2007
The key to Andre the Giant is this . even as a youth he knew that his disease would dramatically shorten his life. He knew there was no cure, and lived every day with the understanding that death could shamble around the very next corner. Knowledge of this sort can darken a life. It did not darken Andre.s. He chose instead to pack his days with as much insane, drunken fun as they could hold. Instead of languishing in the darkness, he chose to walk in the sun.
posted by ColdChef
at 12:38 PM - 96 comments
January 20, 2007
January 19, 2007
January 18, 2007
January 14, 2007
Martin Luther King's private secretary from 1960 until his death, has
died at age 81. While few have heard of Ms. McDonald, she was a very important figure in King's work, and was the one who had to tell
Coretta Scott King that her husband had been murdered.
posted by cerebus19
at 6:33 PM - 6 comments
January 13, 2007
Arguably, one of the most influential saxophonists of all time, he has lost his fight against myelodysplastic syndrome. Truly a major loss for the jazz and rock worlds.
posted by milnak
at 5:10 PM - 30 comments
January 12, 2007
January 11, 2007
"Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd."
posted by Sticherbeast
at 11:50 AM - 191 comments
and since then, nearly 800 prisoners have passed through the detention center in southeastern Cuba.
To mark the anniversary, demonstrations are planned Thursday in New York, London, Sydney, Australia, and other cities as well as dozens of small towns in the United States and Britain.
Gitmo Detainees Join Hunger Strike .... & ....
WikiPeidia History Article
posted by Bodyguard
at 1:12 AM - 7 comments
January 10, 2007
A map depicting the point of origin, of solders killed in Iraq.
posted by nola
at 2:28 PM - 34 comments
January 9, 2007
January 8, 2007
January 7, 2007
January 6, 2007
January 5, 2007
January 2, 2007
December 29, 2006
December 27, 2006
December 26, 2006
and NBC News is reporting that former President Gerald Ford has died at age 93.
posted by barrista
at 9:01 PM - 258 comments
December 25, 2006
December 22, 2006
December 21, 2006
is dead. The self-designated "father of the Turkmen" was the absolute ruler of Turkmenistan for fifteen years, a minor middle-Asian country which would completely escape the notice of the West if it wasn't for
Turkmenbashi's unique form of excess
and its oil. Along with the usual human rights violations and wallowing in wealth -- an estimated $3 billion cached in private accounts -- he dedicated himself to reshaping Turkmen's philosophy and cosmology on a scale to inspire Kim Jong Il. Among his accomplishments are
redefining the ages of Man and
renaming the names of days and months after neutrality, the flag, and Turkmenbashi's mother. Who now will speak up for
Turkmen Melon Day?
posted by ardgedee
at 4:10 AM - 42 comments
December 20, 2006
December 19, 2006
December 18, 2006
December 15, 2006
Ahmet Ertegun, 1923-2006. Co-founder of Atlantic Records, 83 year-old Ertegun had been in a coma since he fell backstage at a concert by The Rolling Stones at Beacon Theatre, NYC, in October. Very comprehensive obit -- more complete than either the one in Variety or New York Times -- to be found in UK's
Guardian
posted by Mister Bijou
at 7:44 AM - 23 comments
December 14, 2006
December 13, 2006
On December 13, 1862,
Sgt. Richard Rowland Kirkland of the 2nd Carolina stood in the
Sunken Road at the bottom of Marye's Heights at the
Battle of Fredericksburg. The 19-year-old Kirkland was part of Longstreet's First Corps; across from him was Hooker's Center Grand Division, part of the Army of the Potomac under Ambrose Burnside. (More boring history stuff inside.)
posted by forrest
at 2:14 PM - 26 comments
December 12, 2006
December 11, 2006
has
died at the age of 116. I can only imagine the things that she must have lived & experienced first hand.
posted by drstein
at 3:02 PM - 29 comments
December 10, 2006
December 7, 2006
December 6, 2006
December 4, 2006
Searchers found Kati Kim and two children but James, who left his family in the car, is still missing after going out for help two days ago.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink
at 5:13 PM - 91 comments
Police are seeking a Jewish male in his early thirties in connection with the killing.
posted by EarBucket
at 3:06 PM - 47 comments
December 3, 2006
is in serious condition but stable after heart attack. Just last week he celebrated his 91th birthday and said that he accepted
'political responsibility' for what happened during his dictatorship. Also, before the heart attack he was under house arrest for the disappearance of two persons and being investigated because of tax evasion. -- The popular reaction in Chile has been similar to other occasions: some celebrate; some are sad, but most just want an undivided Chile.
posted by Memo
at 8:43 AM - 35 comments
November 30, 2006
November 28, 2006
Alan "Fluff" Freeman has died at
the age of 79.
Although he
gave up broadcasting in 2000, due to poor health, he will always be remembered as the man who invented the chart rundown, complete with background music and jingles.
He is probably best known for
Pick of the Pops, which reached a mainstream audience, but was also a champion of rock music. Along with
John Peel and
Tommy Vance, Fluff was the last of the three great DJ's I grew up listening to on late night radio. I'm too young to remember his Radio Luxembourg shows, but The Saturday Night Rock Show on Radio 1 was compulsory listening, part for the music and part for Fluff's unique catchphrases and jingles, particularly
Sign of the Swingin' Cymbal (rm) which became his theme on all his radio shows. He was also the inspiration behind the Harry Enfield character
Dave Nice. We'll miss you Fluff. Not 'arf!
posted by bap98189
at 3:48 AM - 29 comments
November 26, 2006
The cause of death was apparently complications from diabetes; he died peacefully, in his sleep. Comics fans would know him from a number of projects, amongst them
Giant Size X-Men #1 where he helped introduce Colossus, Storm and Nightcrawler to the world, his run on the Legion of Super Heroes, and possibly his self-published work The Futurians.
You can find some nice retrospectives on his career and what he did for Marvel and for DC Comics.
posted by mephron
at 4:49 PM - 27 comments
November 24, 2006
"The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published its annual
report on human development. It denounces the world's complacent disregard for such unglamorous subjects as standpipes, latrines and the 1.8m children who die each year from diarrhoea because the authorities cannot keep their drinking water separate from their faeces.
The study is both coldly analytical and angry..."
posted by kliuless
at 11:11 AM - 18 comments
November 22, 2006
November 21, 2006
November 18, 2006
November 17, 2006
Thousands of Congolese girls and women, among the hundreds of thousands of rape cases, who have been deliberately harmed following their rape in a particular way with a brutality that staggers the mind.
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
at 2:22 PM - 112 comments
November 16, 2006
One of the most famous economists to come out of the
Chicago school, his 1962 book
Capitalism and Freedom was a straightforward challenge to the predominant
Keynesian model that government intervention was frequently necessary to prevent market failures, arguing instead that the way to true political freedom was through economic freedom. He was a devout
monetarist and although conventional wisdom conflates conservatism with laissez-faire economics, he described his own philosophy as
liberal in the Enlightenment sense of the word. His 1980 book
Free to Choose, written with his wife Rose in conjunction with the
PBS series of the same name, explained in layman's term his philosophy of how a truly free market works for the benefit of society.
posted by Doofus Magoo
at 11:02 AM - 123 comments
November 12, 2006
Each and every day a comic strip abuses the use of the silent second-to-last panel.
posted by boo_radley
at 9:33 PM - 24 comments
November 11, 2006
November 10, 2006
Ellen Willis was a writer and critic who wrote for the
Voice, the
Nation, and
Dissent, among many others; her
NYU homepage and
Wikipedia entry link to a number of essays and reviews, all of which are worth your time. She didn't make me a feminist, but her writing gave me much of the intellectual framework of my feminism and throughout the depressing retreat of the '80s reminded me there was still humor and hope. (From her
Wikiquote page: "My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.") She
died yesterday, of lung cancer, at the absurdly early age of 64. I'd like to quote from her "Escape from New York" (
Village Voice, July 29-Aug. 4, 1981), an account of a bus trip across the country that shows her inextricable mix of the personal, the political, and the just plain human: [more inside]
posted by languagehat
at 6:43 PM - 15 comments
November 9, 2006
November 8, 2006
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld resigns.
posted by ernie
at 10:00 AM - 237 comments
November 7, 2006
Spears, rocketed to fame in 1998 at the age of 16 by her debut single
Hit Me Baby One More Time, married backup dancer
Kevin Federline in
September of 2004, scarcely nine months after her first abortive Las Vegasmarriage to childhood friend
Jason Alexander. After two children (and one
sculpture), Britney graciously introduced her husband at the recent Teen Choice awards where Kevin played a song from his
new album. It looked like nothing could stop those two lovebirds. But after a
recent Letterman appearance with a hot recently pregnant Britney showed up not wearing her rings, the truth finally came out. The dream is over.
posted by Stynxno
at 1:38 PM - 141 comments
November 5, 2006
November 3, 2006
New York
film and theatre actress and director, died on 1 November 2006 of unknown causes. A longtime "next-big-thing", Shelly's early performances in
Hal Hartley's films (most notably
Trust) are cherished by fans of 1990s independent films. She is survived by her husband and three-year-old daughter.
posted by pxe2000
at 10:33 AM - 30 comments
November 2, 2006
November 1, 2006
Sure, they're not cute. But they're at least as important as your fuzzy thing.
posted by owhydididoit
at 8:43 AM - 15 comments
The stalls in a girls. restroom have no doors. Fights break out daily. About 50 students have been suspended; 20 have been recommended for expulsion. Several weeks ago, a teacher was .beaten unmercifully. by a ninth grader enraged at being barred from class because he was late.
The principal, Donald Jackson, estimated that up to a fifth of the 775 students live without parents.
.Basically, they are raising themselves, because there is no authority figure in the home,. Mr. Jackson said. .If I call for a parent because I.m having an issue, I may be getting an aunt, who may be at the oldest 20, 21. What type of governance, what type of structure is in the home, if this is the living conditions?.
This is
John McDonogh High School in
New Orleans.
posted by four panels
at 7:44 AM - 56 comments
, after 35 years on the show,
Bob Barker is
leaving the Price is Right. His
first ever show was September 4th, 1972 (note how much less spazzy the audience is on that intro?). No longer will we hear his reminder to have your pets spayed or neutered, but there's still the
DJ&T Foundation that he started to help distribute vouchers and help support low cost spaying and neutering of pets.
posted by antifuse
at 2:29 AM - 25 comments
October 31, 2006
Composer and arranger
Rogério Duprat passed away on Thursday. Duprat had a substantial career in music for films and commercials, but he is best known for shaping the sound of
Tropicalia, the revolutionary stew of Brazilian folk styles, bossa nova,
MPB, rock, jazz, blues and psychedelica.
Some youtube clips:
Caetano Veloso,
Gilberto Gil ,
Os Mutantes, and
Gal Costa.
posted by hydrophonic
at 12:32 AM - 8 comments
October 30, 2006
Sport and free climbing pioneer/entrepreneur, Todd Skinner, died over the weekend in a 500-foot fall.
Sadly, it appears that his death was from a
"..very worn.." belay loop on his harness.
I met Todd about 10 years ago, and was struck by his warmth and enthusiasm. He spent almost three hours at a dingy Seattle climbing gym with about 10 neophyte femail climbers. He helped us all climb better and have more fun. He was generous with his praise, and offered truly helpful instruction - his ego did not get in the way (unlike many climbing instructors/"stars"). He'll be missed.
posted by dbmcd
at 10:00 AM - 32 comments
October 29, 2006
October 28, 2006
October 25, 2006
October 19, 2006
Dick and Rick Hoyt are a father-and-son team from Massachusetts who together compete just about continuously in marathon races. And if they.re not in a marathon they are in a triathlon . that daunting, almost superhuman, combination of 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles of bicycling, and 2.4 miles of swimming. Together they have climbed mountains, and once trekked 3,735 miles across America.
It.s a remarkable record of exertion . all the more so when you consider that Rick can't walk or talk.
Quite possibly one of the most inspirational stories that I've ever encountered --
Team Hoyt.
posted by purephase
at 10:53 AM - 20 comments
October 18, 2006
When American service members are killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, people from their base form a Patriot Detail, an ad hoc honor guard that escorts the flag-draped coffin to the airplane that will carry their body home. A reporter
recently observed one of the ceremonies; some
earlier descriptions.
posted by kirkaracha
at 12:21 PM - 6 comments
you're out! "I've witnessed enough near collisions" in the playground area, D'Elia said. "I support anything that makes the playground safer and helps teacher to keep track of them."
posted by setanor
at 10:31 AM - 123 comments
October 16, 2006
October 15, 2006
October 14, 2006
October 13, 2006
at the end of the month. Yeah, newsfilter, NYCfilter, say what you will, and the club hasn't "mattered" in decades, but anyone who cares about punk rock will feel the pang. This should probably have been posted by jonmc, but I wanted to do it so I could highlight
this excellent piece by Paul Collins; besides the inevitable "I played CBs" anecdote, there's some wonderful history of the site. [Quote inside.]
posted by languagehat
at 8:48 AM - 110 comments
director, has
died at 86. Most famous for his controversial classic,
The Battle of Algiers (a movie whose relevence is still being
felt ), he also directed numerous
other films over a long career.
Pontecorvo threads previously on mefi 1,
2
posted by Chrischris
at 6:07 AM - 15 comments
October 11, 2006
Reiser and his company,
Namesys, developed one of Linux's most popular filesystems, ReiserFS, and are currently working on the next generation,
Reiser4. Reiser was
interviewed by KernelTrap last year:
A willingness to believe that data indicates that one is wrong, and sometimes perhaps that everyone is wrong, is essential to a scientist. Boys think that being brilliant will make them a great scientist. Men know that, in the words of Sir Francis Bacon "men are imperfect mirrors of the creator". and that rigor, thoroughness, and a belief in data over consensus are what really matters. I am a blind man with a stick, and my contribution to society is that I ignorantly poke where none have poked before because I am more sure that I am such a fool I'd better check it than anyone else in my field. My only true insight into the field is knowing what a fool I am.
Reiser has sometimes been
known as abrasive and arrogant in development circles, but no body has been found. The future of Reiser's two children remains unclear.
[more @ arstechnica]
posted by nasreddin
at 9:22 PM - 80 comments
according to a study being published in the Lancet on Saturday. The work follows up a controversial late 2004
study by the same researchers that estimated "excess deaths" due to the conflict (at that time) to be 100,000. In response to criticism that the 2004 paper's margin of error was uselessly high (the 95% confidence interval was 8,000-194,000), the new results are based on a larger sample, yielding more reasonable range of 426,000-793,000. The paper is virtually guaranteed to reignite
debate over the accuracy of the most widely cited source for Iraqi casualty information, the
Iraq Body Count project (which currently gives a max of 48,893), and the media reports it relies on. The lead author, Les Roberts of John Hopkins, has
said that the original study's publication was timed to influence the 2004 elections, and it would appear that this one is as well. [more inside]
posted by gsteff
at 12:54 AM - 214 comments
October 9, 2006
October 7, 2006
October 5, 2006
Google Code Search, originally developed as an internal tool to search their volumes of source code, has been expanded to include many major open-source repositories, and released via Google Labs. Who knows what lurks
in the heart of cvs?
posted by mkultra
at 7:38 AM - 42 comments
October 2, 2006
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Dan Murphy was just pulling up on his motorcycle at his favorite place to
hang glide in San Francisco.
Fort Funston, just south of the City, is known for having perfect conditions for the sport. But on this day a deranged man approached him in the parking lot, shooting him in the head at point-blank range. Before the man turned the gun on himself he also shot one of Dan's friends who was nearby. Dan died from his injuries, but he leaves behind a couple of short videos that reveal some of his amazing hang gliding feats, including an
Icarus-like crash, and perhaps his moment of glory when he successfully made a pinpoint landing into a stationary
wheelbarrow. Evidently Dan took great pleasure in twisting in the saddle on take-off. Here's his
signature move. R.I.P.
posted by derangedlarid
at 11:28 PM - 11 comments
October 1, 2006
September 29, 2006
September 28, 2006
September 27, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 25, 2006
September 22, 2006
One of the world's
finest graphic designers, the co-founder of the legendary agencies Forbes, Fletcher & Gill and
Pentagram, has left us after an 18-month battle with cancer. He leaves behind a huge amount of stunning work, and a profound influence on the world of graphic design. A retrospective of his life and work is opening in November at the
Design Museum in London.
posted by ninthart
at 12:03 PM - 15 comments
September 21, 2006
A master at the subtle manipulation of light, the multiple academy award winner and longtime Ingmar Bergman collaborator (including Persona, and the Through a Glass Darkly/Winter Light/The Silence trilogy) has passed away at 83.
more obits [1] [2]
more about him [1] [2]
posted by juv3nal
at 11:08 PM - 22 comments
In 1957,
Don Walser stopped recording country music and became a National Guardsman, just as rock 'n' roll took over the airwaves. He stayed with the Guard for 39 years, but around 1990, his performances at Henry's in Austin, Texas developed a following. By the end of the decade, he would sign to
Sire Records, open for Ministry and the Butthole Surfers, collaborate with
Kronos Quartet and be honored with a
National Heritage Award. Walser retired from his music career in 2001 because of ill health. He
passed away on Wednesday at age 72.
posted by NemesisVex
at 10:05 AM - 17 comments
September 20, 2006
September 19, 2006
a walking tour and online documentary about the Washington DC hardcore punk scene.
posted by skullbee
at 7:24 PM - 46 comments
September 18, 2006
September 15, 2006
"
My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the
end of the road. What a pity. I would like to
live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the
trial. I do think I will be found
guilty."
-Oriana Fallaci
posted by felix betachat
at 9:35 AM - 47 comments
September 14, 2006
September 12, 2006
With Don Chadwick, Bill Stumpf designed the Aeron, the first .alternative. office-chair design to become a household name. Stumpf died 30 August 2006 (linked news release is from 5 September)
posted by joeclark
at 12:10 PM - 24 comments
September 11, 2006
Not only should we spare a thought to the thousands of ordinary New Yorkers who died needlessly in a day of madness, we should also spare a thought to the
thousands of Chileans that perished in Chile under the Pinochet regime...
33 years ago,
Salvador Allende Gossens, the very first democratically elected socialist head of state in the western hemisphere, was overthrown by the Chilean armed forces, led by Augusto Ugarte Pinochet
with CIA support.
posted by tomcosgrave
at 12:04 PM - 23 comments
September 10, 2006
Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the centre of fresh abuse allegations just a week after it was handed over to Iraqi authorities, with claims that inmates are being tortured by their new captors. Mass executions, torture again, etc. How bad is it when the inmates plead
for us to come back? (Warning--this second link is graphic evidence of what we did there--NSFW)
posted by amberglow
at 12:00 PM - 27 comments
September 7, 2006
September 5, 2006
September 3, 2006
September 1, 2006
"In the 1960s, the United States blanketed the Mekong River delta with Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant more devastating than napalm. Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, the poisoned legacy lives on in the children whose deformities it is said to have caused." Photo essay by James Nachtwey,
written essay by Christopher Hitchens.
[Previously discussed here and here, via C&L.]
posted by homunculus
at 11:30 PM - 31 comments
"People at the time experienced it differently. We may think they were misinformed and deluded, and perhaps they were, or maybe we have become incredibly cynical and mistrusting. What were once considered to be civic virtues are now thought to be quaint anachronisms at best or grand delusions at worst. Things change." The site proffers an incredible variety of popular-press articles and imagery concerning the unfortunate European events of 1914 to 1918.
posted by mwhybark
at 2:58 PM - 40 comments
[t]he concept was offered by Roman Catholic bishops as an alternative to opening a one-time window for the filing of civil lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse that occurred as long as 35 years ago." From
Megan and
Sarah to
Amie to...well...this.
posted by Sticherbeast
at 9:06 AM - 78 comments
August 31, 2006
On Aug 15 a three year old Cincinnati-area boy
Marcus Fiesel, was reported
missing. The truth has finally come out.
On August 4th Marcus's arms were tied behind his back, wrapped in a blanket and bound with packing tape, and was locked into a closet by his foster parents. The boy was dead when they returned from thier two day long trip on August 6th. The foster dad then took the boys body to a rural location and burned it, several times, and reported him missing, over a week later. They claimed innoence even while they moved to a new house just days after he went missing. Then the until the police found the body, not far from a remote house of one foster mother's family members.
no national outlet has reported it, it's largely been ignored due to the renewed media obsession with JonBenet Ramsey.
Was it that Marcus was a boy? That he was dark haired? Or that he was poor and in foster care?
posted by Dome-O-Rama
at 7:46 AM - 90 comments
August 30, 2006
August 25, 2006
August 24, 2006
Here's a dot
. an octave and a half above high C for the legendary jazz trumpeter
Maynard Ferguson, who has
passed away at 78. Building on the experimental wanderings of Miles Davis, Ferguson fused jazz and rock in creating what is quite probably the signature big band sound of the psychadelic and disco eras. (
See, e.g., "Rocky" (.wav).) He was well-known for astounding technical proficiency and his tight-lipped
embochure created one of the largest ranges of any trumpeter. (
Here's Ferguson playing and conducting "Round Midnight" in a very early clip
[youtube]). But legions of former high school trumpet geeks
full disclosure: I am one will remember him best for his commitment to signing promising young players for his tours and his reaching out, with
tireless touring at tiny venues, to high school and college bandies and drum corps-types who at one time or another came across his repertoire.
posted by Saucy Intruder
at 11:00 PM - 32 comments
... the textbooks, mnemonic devices and more will have to be changed today. Pluto has been demoted from its status as planet to a
dwarf planet. We now have 8 in our solar system. The debate is
not at all new, and its apparent resolution may not matter to our everyday lives, but it's just a little weird to think of all of the things that will have to be retroactively edited or amended as a result.
posted by twiggy
at 6:47 AM - 96 comments
August 23, 2006
Most 18-year-old students entering the class of 2010 this fall were born in 1988. For them: Billy Carter, Lucille Ball, Gilda Radner, Billy Martin, Andy Gibb, and Secretariat have always been dead. They have known only two presidents. Ringo Starr has always been clean and sober. Paul Newman has always made salad dressing. Gas has always been unleaded and Don Imus has always been offending someone in his national audience. Wisconsin's Beloit College has published its sixth annual
Mindset List. [2003 list
previously discussed]
posted by ericb
at 9:07 PM - 80 comments
August 21, 2006
The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war. Indeed, the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into total Bosnia-like devastation is 135,000 U.S. troops -- and even they are merely slowing the fall... The consequences of an all-out civil war in Iraq could be dire. Considering the experiences of recent such conflicts, hundreds of thousands of people may die. Refugees and displaced people could number in the millions. And with Iraqi insurgents, militias and organized crime rings wreaking havoc on Iraq's oil infrastructure, a full-scale civil war could send global oil prices soaring even higher... Welcome to the new "new Middle East" -- a region where civil wars could follow one after another, like so many Cold War dominoes. And unlike communism, these dominoes may actually fall.
What Next?See also
Mindless in IraqAnd note that, as of tomorrow, Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006,
the war in Iraq will have lasted one full week longer than US involvement in World War II.
posted by y2karl
at 11:49 AM - 52 comments
He once took
a photo that may seem familiar to you. That image is so iconic that it lent itself to a later
memorial and was
echoed in the aftermath of another famous incident.
posted by pax digita
at 8:13 AM - 29 comments
August 18, 2006
Street Cents, a staple on The
CBC for 17 years, has been
canceled. The Emmy award-winning show focused on consumer and media awareness for teens and pre-teens.
Street Cents is filmed in
Halifax, NS and airs without commercial interruption in order to avoid potential conflict with advertisers who were regularly taken to task on the show. The last episode will air on October 1st, 2006.
posted by purephase
at 6:26 PM - 33 comments
August 17, 2006
August 16, 2006
Maine's
chupacabra dead at 25. Finally done in by a bondo covered El Camino SS (poster speculation on car type and quality).
posted by Mayor Curley
at 7:45 PM - 24 comments
August 15, 2006
August 13, 2006
August 12, 2006
August 11, 2006
When Michael Graham's wife Elizabeth was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, she made up her mind to die before she became completely immobile. Michael knew he would have to help her - even though it could land him in jail.
(note: unless you're unlucky, this is quite likely the saddest story you'll read today)
posted by jonson
at 4:09 PM - 32 comments
August 10, 2006
Terror plot
disrupted. Scotland Yard has arrested about 18 potential terrorists who were planning to blow up UK to USA flights mid-air. The
UK threat level is now
critical - "an attack is expected imminently". And there's
chaos at the airports where hand luggage has been banned from all flights.
posted by featherboa
at 12:03 AM - 506 comments
August 9, 2006
August 7, 2006
A single misplaced comma in a 14-page contact costs Rogers Cable a couple million dollars, and could have cost them tens of millions. Remember, folks, punctuation has meaning!
posted by five fresh fish
at 8:37 AM - 56 comments
August 5, 2006
August 4, 2006
Los Angeles artist, died Tuesday. He was 41. Rhoades was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and showed frequently in the US and Europe. Some of his work:
1,
2,
3. Also
here.
posted by R. Mutt
at 2:45 PM - 18 comments
August 3, 2006
August 1, 2006
The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour. When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.
posted by MetaMonkey
at 8:06 PM - 32 comments
July 31, 2006
During a prolific activist career spanning half a century, Bookchin forged a new anti-authoritarian outlook called
social ecology, which sought to reclaim local political power, by means of direct popular democracy, against the consolidation and increasing centralization of the nation state.
Bookchin was a relentless critic of ideologically similar movements that he found disturbing, including the New Left's drift toward Marxism-Leninism in the late 1960s, tendencies toward mysticism and misanthropy in the radical environmental movement, and the growing focus on individualism and personal lifestyles among anarchists.
He was kicked out of the Young Communist League at age 18 for openly criticizing Stalin. In 1974, he co-founded the
Institute for Social Ecology. He published more than 20 books and hundreds of articles during his lifetime.
A public memorial service will be held for him in Burlington, Vermont, on Sunday, August 13th. (Summarized from an email sent by
Brian Tokar.)
posted by strangeleftydoublethink
at 12:02 PM - 18 comments
July 30, 2006
July 29, 2006
July 28, 2006
July 27, 2006
Listen to
Kevin Cosgrove speak with a 911 operator during the final moments of his life on September 11, 2001 — and the most heartbreaking moment is, without a doubt, the very final moment.
posted by WCityMike
at 4:57 PM - 203 comments
July 25, 2006
July 21, 2006
July 19, 2006
July 18, 2006
July 17, 2006
July 14, 2006
is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why
.
posted by kyleg
at 12:42 AM - 181 comments
July 13, 2006
July 11, 2006
Pink Floyd
founder (paid tribute to by his former bandmates in "Shine On You Crazy Diamond) who had succumbed to
mental illness passes away due to complications of diabetes. RIP.
posted by jonmc
at 6:39 AM - 208 comments
July 10, 2006
the folks at
Caution Zero bring you a seven minute tracking shot of a vampire with bunny slippers being attacked by zombies. We've obviously done our zombiefilter tracking
here,
here, and
here, but I figured new advances in zombie aesthetic were worth noting.
posted by HellKatonWheelz
at 5:57 AM - 6 comments
July 9, 2006
July 8, 2006
You got your driver's license in February, and you just graduated from high school. Last Wednesday night you're zooming down Hwy 101 at 100 mph, racing another car, and you smash into the side of an SUV, killing all three people inside.Turns out two of them were Prince Tu.ipelehake and Princess Kaimana Aleamotu.a Tuku.aho of the
Tonga royal family, the only royal monarchy left in the Pacific. Now
an entire nation is is mourning and
your bail is $3 million.
posted by gottabefunky
at 12:00 PM - 192 comments
July 7, 2006
By a 4 to 2 margin, the
New York Court of Appeals, New York's highest court,
upheld (70 page pdf) the state's Domestic Relations law that bars same-sex couples from
getting married in New York and denying same-sex couples the hundreds of family protections provided to married couples. The court accepted the justifications advanced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for the state law barring marriage by same-sex couples. "Pointing out that stable relationships between parents are important for children, that straight couples can conceive children by 'accident,' and that gay couples can only have children with advance planning, Bloomberg and Spitzer argued that straight couples need the stability of marriage, but gay couples do not." The ruling was
denounced by the ACLU,
criticized by Howard Dean as based on "outdated and bigoted notions about families," and applauded by the
Marriage Law Foundation pleased by the "superb and straightforward legal analysis."
Background from NPR.
posted by three blind mice
at 1:20 AM - 104 comments
July 5, 2006
"
This statue proves that Jesus Christ is Lord over America, he is Lord over Tennessee, he is Lord over Memphis."
posted by naomi
at 7:32 AM - 145 comments
July 1, 2006
90 years ago today, whistles blew around the river Somme in France as British troops prepared for an attack on German trenches. By the end of the day they had suffered 57,470 casualties. By the battle's end in November, there were over 600,000 Allied casualties, with perhaps the same number of German casualties. The
Imperial War Museum has launched an online exhibition, where you can find out more about
how the battle was planned, personal stories of those involved, and
myths about the attack. Elsewhere you can find copies of
Army reports on the first day, look at
film of the attack,
diaries and letters home from the troops, go on
tours of the
trenches, listen to
contemporary songs and music inspired by the battle, and see some
more modern responses.
posted by greycap
at 12:54 AM - 38 comments
June 30, 2006
Loompanics, a libertarian publisher in Washington State, has gone out of business. Some blame the changed political climate after 9/11. Others blame Amazon.com and the big bookstore chains. No matter what the cause might be, I will miss them. What will I do if I decide I want to try to
cook some crank? And if that doesn't succeed in paying the bills, what if I need to go
dumpster diving for my dinner? And if get truly desperate, what if I decide
to rip off a drug dealer instead?
I'm glad that
Amok is still with us.
posted by jason's_planet
at 2:59 PM - 23 comments
Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass lightbulb in his anus.
posted by three blind mice
at 12:33 PM - 78 comments
Favorites Basso, Ullrich out of the Tour de France. Should make for an interesting July.
posted by dizzycow
at 6:48 AM - 53 comments
June 28, 2006
is the British Editor of Vanity Fair. In the
current issue he attacks what he describes as "[Tony] Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law". The article follows a
series of
columns for The Observer and an
extraordinary exchange of email between the two men, and has resonance in probably all countries in the Western world.
posted by Neiltupper
at 10:08 PM - 37 comments
June 27, 2006
passed away Sunday. Yes, the first is a
NYTimes link, but
here's an obit from the
Independent newspaper, and
here's a BBC obit as well. It would be unseemly not to note the passing of the arranger or producer (or both, or co- ) behind the Art Farmer Quartet's
Live at the Half-Note, Sonny Stitt's
Stitt Plays Bird, Max Roach's
Drums Unlimited, the Rascals' "Good Lovin'" and "Groovin'," Aretha Franklin's
I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You and
Aretha Now, Dusty Springfield's
Dusty in Memphis, Donny Hathaway's
Extension of a Man, the Stones'
Black and Blue, Chaka Khan's first several solo albums, and hundreds of others all the way down to Norah Jones ... a list almost too long to compile. NPR interview
here, lengthier article from
Sound on Sound here, his discogs.com list
here.
posted by blucevalo
at 1:45 PM - 11 comments
June 26, 2006
June 25, 2006
In 1945-46, some of the (very few) Polish Jews who had survived the Final Solution returned -- sick, poor, wounded -- to Poland. In Elie Wiesel's words, "they had thought all too naively that antisemitism, discredited 6 million times over, had died at Auschwitz with its victims.
They were wrong." In 2001 Princeton professor
Jan T
Gross published
the story of the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community at
Jedwabne, Poland, and proved how Jews were rounded up, clubbed, drowned, gutted or burned to death not by German forces as previously believed
but by mobs of their own non-Jewish neighbors. Now professor Gross tells the story of the
Kielce pogrom in his new book, "
Fear". Of course, the Kielce butchery took place in 1946 -- more than a year
after the end of WWII and defeat of Nazism. More inside.
posted by matteo
at 8:25 AM - 107 comments
June 23, 2006
She passed away overnight from a heart attack. She was 175 years old, the size of a dinner table, and may have known Charles Darwin. She was
Harriet the Tortoise, the world's oldest living animal, and lived a life of quiet dignity.
posted by justkevin
at 7:26 AM - 41 comments
June 21, 2006
on 30th July, 2006 after 42 years on television in the UK.
The show has been loved by some and criticized by others for having bands mime their own tunes on the air, but was a mainstay up until a recent ratings slide. Over four decades TOTP saw its fair share of
odd incidents and even
inspired a few tunes. Presumably this bodes ill for the proposed second
US version of the iconic program.
posted by ktoad
at 3:26 PM - 28 comments
June 18, 2006
- In 2003 the Bush administration rejected an Iranian offer to recognize Israel, end support of Palestinian terror organizations, help out in Iraq, and talk about their nuclear program.
posted by sourbrew
at 8:41 PM - 66 comments
June 17, 2006
James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 47:
The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
That extraordinary powers have, under Bush, been accumulated in the "same hands" is now undeniable. For the first time in more than thirty years, and to a greater extent than even then, our constitutional form of government is in jeopardy.
Power Grab
posted by y2karl
at 7:20 AM - 76 comments
June 14, 2006
of North Korean life, as taken by a Russian tourist. The degree of "Big Brother" style oversight present via the photo narration is daunting.
posted by jonson
at 7:22 AM - 90 comments
June 12, 2006
As Verizon Communications' executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communications, Tauke has spent the last few months embroiled in a fiery debate over Net neutrality, the concept that broadband providers must be legally required to treat all content equally.
posted by Postroad
at 4:07 PM - 42 comments
June 11, 2006
June 9, 2006
June 8, 2006
The Language of Noncombatant Death - Perhaps, however, what the "incidents" have in common -- and what they really tell us about the war in Iraq (as in Vietnam long ago) -- is this: In both Haditha and Ishaqi, the dead were largely or all civilian noncombatants: an aged amputee in a wheelchair holding a Koran, small children, grandparents, students, women, and a random taxi driver all died... In modern wars, especially those conducted in part from the air (as both Iraq and Afghanistan have been), there's nothing "collateral" about civilian deaths. If anything, the "collateral deaths" are those of the combatants on any side. Civilian deaths are now the central fact, the very essence of war. Not seeing that means not seeing war.
Collateral Damage: The "Incident at Haditha"
The Power Point version:
Why Did We Lose In Iraq ?
posted by y2karl
at 9:51 AM - 63 comments
The wonderful pianist
Hilton Ruiz, who "had been in a coma since May 19, when he was found outside a French Quarter bar with severe head injuries," has died in a New Orleans hospital. He'd played with everyone from Freddie Hubbard and Rahsaan Roland Kirk to Charles Mingus, Betty Carter, Archie Shepp, and Clark Terry. Sad news, especially coming hard on the heels of the loss of
Billy Preston.
posted by languagehat
at 6:56 AM - 16 comments
June 7, 2006
Australian WIM (Women's International Master)
Arianne Caoili, "the Anna Kournikova of chess" has sent the chess world into a spin with her salsa crazy antics. A love triangle between herself, British chess grandmaster Danny Gormally and the world's No. 3 player, Armenia's Levon Aronian turned ugly in a Turin nightclub during the World Chess Olympiad recently.
posted by kurtrudder
at 2:39 AM - 72 comments
June 6, 2006
Was in Eastern WA this weekend, attending the graduation of my nephew from a high school in Kennewick. He reminded me about nearby Richland High School, and their somewhat unique "
mascot", so thought I might do some looking around.
For those with true School Spirit, pick up some
swag. I'm getting earrings for my wife! --Yikes-O-Rama--
posted by somnambulist
at 5:21 PM - 41 comments
conducted by the folks at leftlanenews.com. Can a Ferrari 575 catch up to a Fiat hatckback after a 31-second head start in a single-lap track race? Better still, can an F1 car catch up to both after waiting 1:27? The results aren.t necessarily surprising, but it.s pretty stunning to see.
posted by jonson
at 2:33 PM - 51 comments
IF THE FIRST OF TWO RAPTURES HAS NOT HAPPENED AND ANTICHRIST HAS NOT DECLARED HIMSELF ON WORLD SIMULCAST TELEVISION, THEN I (PASTOR HARRY) WILL REVEAL THE TRUE NAME AND IDENTITY OF THE ANTICHRIST AT 11:05 PM EST ON THIS SITE AND ON DOOMSDAY TALK RADIO, OUR INTERNET RADIO BROADCAST.
posted by three blind mice
at 11:54 AM - 148 comments
Tulse Luper Update:
Twice before we.ve discussed Peter Greenaway.s .upcoming. multimedia project
The Tulse Luper Suitcases:
three movies,
two books, a
VJ tour (
.wmv interview about a similar project,
Nightwatching, to give you some idea of what a VJ tour is), and more. With the recent launch of the online multiplayer game,
The Tulse Luper Journey , perhaps the project is no longer upcoming at all. The story centers on
92 suitcases related to the life of Greenaway.s alter ego
Tulse Luper. Discovered in various locations around the globe, the suitcases illustrate the
history of Uranium (and by extension the history of the
20th century). Read Greenaway.s lecture on the project
here, hear an interview focused on the VJ performance
here, or read stories attributed to Tulse Luper
here. [More Inside]
posted by jrb223
at 10:09 AM - 12 comments
In the spirit of Seth Roberts' dietary self-experimentation,
Angryman has decided that he's tired of cooking, scrubbing pots and pans, and wasting time in the checkout lines. Instead, he is looking for a constant diet of pelletized, nutritionally complete food:
Monkey Chow [pdf]. [
via]
posted by monju_bosatsu
at 8:11 AM - 48 comments
June 5, 2006
They say she was the woman stabbed to death before 38 witnesses who did nothing. They "didn't want to get involved." To many, her name rings synonymous with "public apathy" and the "
bystander effect." Unfortunately, the details - and the meat - of her case are largely misunderstood. None of that, however, diminishes the tragedy of her death, not only for her family and friends, but also for
her lover.
posted by Sticherbeast
at 4:18 PM - 41 comments
has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key
tenet of the Geneva Conventions that explicitly bans "
humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
posted by EarBucket
at 4:39 AM - 77 comments
June 3, 2006
June 2, 2006
- Charlie Brooker on Internet discussions.
posted by Artw
at 9:56 AM - 67 comments
June 1, 2006
*All other famous musicians simulated. Your milage may vary. Please don't shoot the messenger.
posted by 40 Watt
at 9:07 AM - 77 comments
May 31, 2006
May 29, 2006
May 27, 2006
Upon others, German MP Volker Beck, Oscar Wilde's grandson and Paris mayor's representatives were injured by a mob of fashist thugs and christian-orthodox fundamentalists at Moscow's first gay pride march, and then arrested by the police.
In fraternal unity the violence was called upon by the orthodox church, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, the grand mufti of Russia.s Muslims, and Russia.s chief rabbi. Read this article by Peter Thatchell on UK Gay News for a
first hand account of the events, and for background information
Doug Irland's blog and
Scott Long's Moscow diary, published by the Washington Blade.
posted by kolophon
at 3:13 PM - 54 comments
May 25, 2006
Reggae and ska legend Desmond Dekker
died today in London. In 1968, Dekker's song "Israelites", recorded with his band The Aces, became the first international hit by a Jamaican artist. According to his
official site, the sixty-four-year old Dekker was still touring and booked to perform well into fall 2006.
posted by bcveen
at 8:05 PM - 82 comments
A jury has found Enron founder Ken Lay guilty on all six counts against him of fraud and conspiracy, with a combined possible penalty of 45 years in prison. Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was found guilty on 19 of 28 counts for conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud.
posted by XQUZYPHYR
at 9:14 AM - 96 comments
May 24, 2006
May 23, 2006
El Din's death has not yet been reported in the news, but I'm told he passed away from complications of brain surgery. It's a great loss for music lovers all over the world. "Escalay,"
performed on
oud with the Kronos Quartet on their album
Pieces of Africa, is probably his best-known work, but "Ollin Arageed," his haunting piece for handclaps and
tar -- a goatskin drum -- was
played numerous times onstage with the Grateful Dead, who championed el Din's music and
jammed with him at the Great Pyramid in 1978.
Eclipse provides an excellent introduction to his work, the ethereal sounds of one of the oldest continuously-inhabited regions on the planet. In the 1960s, el Din's own home village in Egypt was drowned underwater by the construction of the Aswan Dam, as archeologists tried to
save what they could.
posted by digaman
at 1:38 PM - 21 comments
He was a renouned senator and vice presidential candidate on the Dukakis ticket, whom you may know better for his famous quote in
this debate.
posted by rollbiz
at 8:21 AM - 49 comments
May 22, 2006
May 21, 2006
that will change your life!
Well, maybe not.
posted by c13
at 7:17 PM - 37 comments
May 19, 2006
"I think Iraq is finished. We.ll just find a way to get out. I frankly don.t think we ever intended to win there."
And: "As a professional intelligence officer, the last people you want to report to are generals and diplomats. And if General Hayden comes to the CIA, we.ll have Mr. Negroponte [a career diplomat] as head of the community, and a general as the head of the CIA."
posted by js003
at 8:08 AM - 48 comments
May 18, 2006
"This administration," Bob Graham, the former Senator and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me, "does not seek the truth as a basis for its judgments, but
tries to use intelligence to validate judgments it has already made."
"I spent 30 years at the CIA," said one former official, "and no one was ever interested in knowing whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. That changed with this administration. Now you have loyalty tests."
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket
at 1:47 PM - 40 comments
May 17, 2006
May 15, 2006
May 13, 2006
is taking place tomorrow in New York City in memory of a fourteen-year-old boy who was rundown on his bike last year.
This man is responsible for the death and there are many
unanswered questions. No charges have been filed, but what is more disturbing is the
lack of remorse from the young man who was responsible for this tragedy.
posted by jennababy
at 7:52 PM - 73 comments
May 12, 2006
How did this get past the marketing department? A gun that shoots shots of white slime? The product review on the Anazon site has been deleted and locked after a flood of joke reviews of the toy which exploited its pornographic similarities.
posted by Liquidwolf
at 12:09 PM - 98 comments
May 11, 2006
May 9, 2006
May 8, 2006
May 5, 2006
May 4, 2006
Peterson was one of
NASA's top test pilots for the lifting body program,
a wingless aircraft with which
NASA experimented during the sixties. Peterson retired from research flying after he barely survived a spectacular crash of his
M2-F2--after Peterson recovered from an oscillation in which the aircraft rolled uncontrollably from side to side, he changed course to avoid colliding with a rescue helicopter, but a cross wind shifted him to an unmarked area of the lakebed. Peterson fired his landing rockets for additional lift, but the M2-F2 hit the lakebed at 250 mph before the landing gear was fully down and locked, rolled six times, and
came to rest upside down. Peterson survived, but lost sight in his right eye.
You may not have heard of
Bruce Peterson, but you're probably familiar with his crash of the M2-F2, although Peterson didn't appreciate being the inspiration and backstory for another fictitious NASA pilot who was badly hurt and lost an eye when his experimental aircraft crashed.
Here he is.
posted by fandango_matt
at 5:14 AM - 17 comments
May 3, 2006
writes
retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey in a memo addressed to the heads of the social science department at West Point summarizing his findings after a week-long fact-finding trip in Iraq. It will take ten years and billions of dollars, but the
McCaffrey Memo claims that to leave Iraq prematurely would risk "a ten year disaster of foreign policy in the vital Gulf Oil Region." Fred Kaplan thinks the
costs are too high.
posted by shivohum
at 7:53 PM - 18 comments
May 2, 2006
to invoke the obscure
state secrets privilege in order to stop the
EFF lawsuit against
AT&T, (previously discussed
here) for providing the NSA direct access
all 312 terabytes of its customers' telephone and internet traffic since 2001, (including those Good Vibrations charges you racked up).
In a nutshell, according to legal experts, invoking the privilege kills the judicial process dead: the courthouse doors are closed, and there's nothing but grownup stuff to see here; move along, kids.
posted by squirrel
at 7:47 PM - 51 comments
A former general explains why he thinks the arguments for staying don't fly. Personally, I think leaving Iraq without
disarming militias would be a disaster.
posted by js003
at 5:14 AM - 42 comments
May 1, 2006
My view is that that.s not possible because it directs psyops against our own friends and allies and even at our own public. ... In Mind Games, Columbia Journalism Review thoroughly examines the disintegrating lines between Public Affairs, Psy-Ops, IO, the public, and the truth. Some old friends are mentioned too: the
Lincoln Group, the
Rendon Group, the Pentagon, our own media, and others.
If truth is our greatest weapon, as Rumsfeld has said, how can the administration hope to prevail in an information war when it is not honest with itself?
posted by amberglow
at 4:53 PM - 21 comments
April 30, 2006
April 29, 2006
"Every year on 4/20, students and residents gather on Farrand Field at CU Boulder to defy the authorities and smoke marijuana publicly. This year, the University of Boulder Police Department fought back by taking pictures of as many participants as possible. They have a website with photos up, offering an $50 reward to anyone who positively identifies someone who was photographed." via BoingBoing
Here are 3 local news stories about it:
1,
2,
3.
I guess the police want to identify people even if they were not visalby commiting a crime, just so they can bring them in and apply pressure root out the real criminals.
Colorado is home to James Dobson's hyper right-wing
Focus on the Family. But Denver and in the west of that state appear to be one of the largest
marijuana usage areas in the country (scroll down a bit)
This area seems radically divided. When my family recently visited Colorado Springs we found it very right-wing but when we engaged a rubber boat trip through the Royal George all of our guides were hippie/eco/stoners.
Can anybody explain this in terms of the obvious factions?
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts
at 12:03 AM - 96 comments
April 28, 2006
April 27, 2006
April 25, 2006
Public Citizen released
a report [PDF link] today that "reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the [U.S.] estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion." The rich get richer...
posted by tippiedog
at 3:41 PM - 73 comments
April 23, 2006
April 22, 2006
This is a stunning set of
photographs by Robert Knoth, taken in the regions of Mayak, Semipalatinsk, Chernobyl, and Tomsk-7.
[via]
posted by 327.ca
at 3:29 PM - 37 comments
April 20, 2006
April 13, 2006
is a browsable database of U.S. service members who've died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Created by
Adrian Holovaty (
chicagocrime.org,
django), the site lets you browse by
age,
death date,
home state and city,
military branch or
multiple search criteria. Each soldier gets his or her own page, as does each
date,
American city,
age,
military branch, etc. There's an RSS feed for
recent casualties, a feed for each state and a feed for each military branch (also features Google Maps on several pages to highlight service members' hometowns). An amazing project that puts faces and stories behind the statistics we hear every day. [via
mefi projects]
posted by mathowie
at 6:07 PM - 55 comments
Three days after the Los Angeles Times broke the story of the
US military secrets for sale at an Afghan bazaar, a reporter for the paper bought ($40) another computer drive sold openly outside the U.S. air base in
Bagram, Afghanistan. The 1-gigabyte flash drive holds "what appears to be a trove of potentially sensitive American intelligence data, including the names, photographs and telephone numbers of Afghan spies informing on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, personal snapshots, Special Forces training manuals, records of direct action training missions in South America, along with numerous computer slide presentations and documents marked secret." Most documents are neither locked nor encrypted. But the good news is, some of them can't be opened without a password, and the Army
is investigating anyway.
(LAT BugMeNot)
posted by PenguinBukkake
at 1:37 AM - 58 comments
April 12, 2006
.... brought to you by Something Awful. Elaborate SA put-on, or so insane it
must be true? I can't decide.
DailyKos summary. [morey]
posted by dhartung
at 9:02 AM - 94 comments
April 11, 2006
--he escaped from Auschwitz with another guy, Wetzler, in April 1944 and got to Slovakia and Hungary, telling the world of the atrocities in the Auschwitz Protocol. Some Hungarian community leaders, however (Hungary was the only country that hadn't had its Jewish population deported yet),
were busy making deals with Eichmann for safe passage away.
In any case, the result was that about 1,700 Hungarian Jewish leaders, with their families and friends, ended up in Switzerland, while almost half a million unsuspecting Hungarian Jews ended up dead in Auschwitz. Vrba's report first alerted the world (including the Vatican, Red Cross, and US and British authorities) to exactly what was going on, and helped prosecute some who were tried later.
...Knowing perfectly well that it was the secrecy surrounding their actions that allowed the Nazis to herd unsuspecting Jews and transport them like sheep to slaughter, Vrba and Wetzler . as soon as they got in touch with Jewish community representatives in their native Slovakia . compiled a detailed report. They wrote about Auschwitz and what awaited Hungarian Jews once they arrived: immediate death by gassing.
posted by amberglow
at 8:50 PM - 17 comments
Not the best written piece of journalism, and at times sharing in the narcissitic delusions of the dealer, but a good look into "the game" -- even if they couldn't find a more cliche dealer (and a good way to throw in slight jabs at rap music, Washington Heights and GTA).
posted by geoff.
at 11:15 AM - 30 comments
April 7, 2006
after the assistant principal at De Anza Middle School told him that
he was going to prison for three years because of his involvement as an organizer of the April 28 school walk-outs to protest the anti-immigrant legislation in Washington. The vice principal also forbade Anthony from attending graduation activities and threatened to fine his mother for Anthony's truancy and participation in the student protests."
Anthony was learning about the importance of civic duties and rights in his eighth grade class. Ironically, he died because the vice principal at his school threatened him for speaking out and exercising those rights," ...
posted by amberglow
at 9:40 PM - 206 comments
April 5, 2006
April 3, 2006
March 30, 2006
March 29, 2006
A source close to the negotiations said that creator Mitch Hurwitz had decided after a lengthy period of debating an offer from Showtime that "Arrested Development reached its end, creatively, as a series."
posted by empath
at 2:04 PM - 58 comments
March 28, 2006
"
Three years ago, I had dinner with now the now infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff (really). I sat down at his now infamous restaurant Signatures, he told me and amazing and wildly improbable story about how he made Red Scorpion and I never heard from him again."
[via mefi projects]
posted by delmoi
at 1:05 PM - 31 comments
March 27, 2006
March 26, 2006
Desmond Doss, first conscientious objector to win a
Medal of Honor, was a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to carry a gun, eat meat, or work on Saturday. Under heavy Japanese fire, he lowered 75 wounded men to safety from the top of the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa. That was only one of his
acts of heroism.
posted by forrest
at 9:07 PM - 17 comments
March 25, 2006
March 24, 2006
Type in an author, and it tells you who wrote similar stuff. Includes a nifty floaty effect. And you know, I never knew that Jane Austen and Socrates had so much
in common.
posted by JanetLand
at 12:48 PM - 57 comments
March 23, 2006
And yes, it has been confirmed that Samuel L. Jackson will say (shout it with me)... [more inside]
posted by UKnowForKids
at 1:28 PM - 144 comments
March 17, 2006
A site dedicated to the faulty capacitors present in even highly-rated manufacturers' boards. There's a
forum with individual boards dedicated to identifying specific boards with faulty caps.
posted by cellphone
at 8:29 PM - 17 comments
about "
Snakes On A Plane" last summer, but since the thread is closed and this trailer really deserves to be seen...
Here you go. [youtube] For those of you yet unaware, prepare yourself for my nomination for "worst movie ever."
posted by pwb503
at 11:43 AM - 185 comments
March 16, 2006
March 15, 2006
A fat teenager with dreams of stardom moves to the big city, loses a lot of the weight but becomes a hard drinker and hard smoker, takes
acting lessons, and then gets lucky in classic Hollywood style: a big actress turns down a choice role in a
Tennessee Williams play and Stapleton gets the part. But it was talent, not luck, that won her the
Tony. This was the start of a long and honored acting career in which she also won Oscars and an Emmy. And yet you're thinking, "Archie's wife?"
posted by pracowity
at 7:44 AM - 30 comments
March 14, 2006
On Wednesday 18 August 1976 at 1040 hours in the morning, a United Nations Command (UNC) work force of five Korean Service Corps (KSC) personnel accompanied by and UNC security force...started to prune a large tree in the vicinity of UNC Check Point #3...Lieutenant Pak then shouted "MI KUN UL CHU KI GI CHA." Translated, it means, "Kill the U.S. Aggressors."; the UNC security force was attacked by a superior force of 30 KPA guards wielding pick handles, knives, clubs, and axes.
posted by Postroad
at 3:17 PM - 20 comments
A new cache of disturbing images and videos from the original interrogations, with commentary from Salon. [Definitely NSFW, or for Earth, for that matter.]
posted by digaman
at 12:59 PM - 48 comments
March 13, 2006
Why Rush Limbaugh prefers radio. Back in 1990 Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted a talk show in front of a live audience. The audience did not agree with him and tore him to pieces. His facial expressions are priceless. Watch the video at
The Panopticist.
posted by Termite
at 10:29 PM - 55 comments
posts its
50,000th post today. Congrats Metafilter! Here is to 50,000 more!
posted by dios
at 12:52 PM - 58 comments
As I sit here I am still shaking. I can't take much more of this shit. I am a Marine Pilot. Not that it means anything anymore. Today was another safety stand down put on by the mother fuckers in DOSS. Why? Cause another one of my friends is dead and gone. Why? Cause he flew his shit into the water that's why. Why'd he do that? Cause the mother fuckers that "be" i.e. the boys at the top have lost their fucking minds and can't say no.
posted by stenseng
at 12:15 PM - 54 comments
March 12, 2006
This is a 24 minute short shot entirely with a digital still camera. The first seven minutes are
available online (quicktime link). It was derived from 40,000 digital still images by Jerome Oliver in a method (that looks cool) that he calls fotomation.
posted by filmgeek
at 2:08 PM - 29 comments
March 11, 2006
March 10, 2006
That MacGowan is still standing, albeit not for long periods and not without help, is part of the reason the public is still fascinated with the group, which has reconvened for a brief US tour -- the Pogues' first stateside shows since 1989.
(BugMeNot)
posted by PenguinBukkake
at 3:56 AM - 54 comments
March 9, 2006
March 8, 2006
March 7, 2006
wife of Christopher Reeves, although not a smoker, died today from lung cancer. (
WP)
posted by sierray
at 6:59 AM - 42 comments
Malian bluesman and
Ry Cooder collaborator Ali Farka Touré has
died at age 66 (or maybe 67). Through his music, and especially his collaborative projects with Western musicians, Touré convincingly made the case that the rhythms and melodies of the Delta blues came straight from Mali and neighboring countries.
posted by kcds
at 6:33 AM - 33 comments
March 6, 2006
March 2, 2006
February 28, 2006
A new
Human Rights First report [PDF] "provides the first comprehensive accounting" of the 98 cases of detainees who have died in US custody in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2002. "Thirty-four deaths were homicides under the U.S. military.s definition...Only 12 deaths have resulted in any kind of
punishment." Most of
the people behind the abuse have been promoted. The
Washington Post concludes that, based on the report, US policy seems to be that torturing a foreign prisoner to death is excusable, but getting photographed doing it will get you in trouble.
posted by kirkaracha
at 2:59 PM - 16 comments
February 27, 2006
February 26, 2006
Added to the rolls of those that passed away this weekend.
Octavia E. Butler
Sci Fi writer, MacArthur Genius grant winner... And as she wrote.
"I'm a 53-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Seattle -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive."
posted by edgeways
at 2:50 PM - 64 comments
February 25, 2006
I will always remember Darren McGavin best as
The Old Man, Ralphie Parker's father, in the best Christmas movie ever made (so says I!), but he had a long and active
career in films and television.
Sigh. I hope there is lots and lots of turkey in heaven, and that the Bumpuses' dogs are nowhere to be found.
posted by John Smallberries
at 9:07 PM - 50 comments
February 24, 2006
of
log files from Palm Beach (FL) county voting machines stemming from the Nov 2004 general election. You know it's not good news when the article starts with:
The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.
posted by taumeson
at 6:18 AM - 96 comments
February 23, 2006
Newsfilter: On Wednesday, the
South Dakota state Senate voted, 23 to 12, to
criminalize abortion. The new law makes it a felony for doctors to perform the procedure, except to save the life of a woman.
"'The momentum for a change in the national policy on abortion is going to come in the not-too-distant future,' said Rep. Roger W. Hunt, a Republican who sponsored the bill. To his delight, abortion opponents succeeded in defeating all amendments designed to mitigate the ban, including exceptions in the case of rape or incest or the health of the woman. Hunt said that such "special circumstances" would have diluted the bill and its impact on the national scene."
posted by milquetoast
at 3:02 AM - 184 comments
February 21, 2006
On February 21, 1965,
Malcolm X was
gunned down in Harlem. After being
shot several times inside the Audubon Ballroom, he was pronounced dead on arrival at Vanderbilt Clinic, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Malcolm sez: "If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country."
(from a November 1963 speech in New York City)
Then, there's this
1964 speech.
posted by mickeyz
at 12:23 PM - 59 comments
February 20, 2006
--because she and her partner fought, New Jersey police and fire department employees can now name anyone--not just a spouse--as a beneficiary for pension rights, helping to protect those they love after they're gone. Just one person who made a difference.
posted by amberglow
at 6:12 AM - 15 comments
February 19, 2006
If you ever feel like you just aren't particularly amusing, what you need to do is find a pack of 1 year old quadruplets. Those
kids will laugh at
anything.
posted by jonson
at 4:13 PM - 110 comments
February 17, 2006
"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis,
Adam Czerniaków was made
head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders
in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 --
Tisha B'Av, the "
saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that
all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the
most prominent Holocaust
scholars,
Raul Hilberg. More inside.
posted by matteo
at 11:22 AM - 23 comments
February 14, 2006
...and G'Kar, and Commander Tomalak, and the big screen's one-armed man, and ... damn.
posted by WolfDaddy
at 6:52 PM - 60 comments
I just watched the chilling video of a
sniper [Flash, NSFW] in Iraq on TV. It was given to Paul McGeough of the
Sydney Morning Herald and published on their site. As discussed on The ABC
Lateline programme (transcript not available at posting time but pretty much covered by the SMH). Please read the report to put the video in perspective. It's propaganda but...
posted by tellurian
at 5:18 AM - 99 comments
February 12, 2006
February 10, 2006
J-Dilla, born James Yancy, was a member of Slum Village and worked with various Hip-Hop artists including Kanye West, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest and Common's Grammy-nominated album, BE.
posted by svidrigailov23
at 4:13 PM - 14 comments
February 9, 2006
February 8, 2006
February 7, 2006
that an
Oregon State University graduate student was publishing a story in the journal
Science. titled, "
Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk," which undercut Bush administration-backed arguments for post-wildfire logging. A week later it was
made public that nine professors in the
College of Forestry (which gets 10% of its funding from a logging tax) lobbied the journal not to publish the article. Among them was
John Sessions, lead author of a report that pressed the U.S. Forest Service to expand salvage logging. After attention was brought to the professors' attempts to keep the article from being published, many
worried about the university's reputation regarding academic freedom, if not the state of academic freedom throughout the academic world. However if it wasn't difficult enough to just worry about your own professors standing in the way of getting your data published, you also have to worry about
the government pulling your funding if your data doesn't match the data they want to see.
"The
Bureau of Land Management acknowledged Monday that it asked OSU if the three-year study led by graduate student Daniel Donato and published last month in the journal Science violated provisions of a $300,000 federal fire research grant that prohibits using any of the funds to lobby Congress and requires that a BLM scientist be consulted before the research is published."
"It's totally without precedent as far as I can recollect," said Jerry Franklin, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied Northwest forests for decades. "It says, 'If we don't like what you're saying, we'll cut off your money.' "
posted by pwb503
at 1:58 PM - 51 comments
February 6, 2006
(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 by caddis
at 8:08 PM - 46 comments
February 5, 2006
Let me offer my condensed summary of cancer. Maybe they could print it on a little card and distribute it in lieu of the sappy brochures:
Congratulations, you have cancer! Your life is about to turn upside down. It causes a lot of stress, and many patients crash and burn horribly. Chemotherapy can save your life, but in the process it'll make you feel like you've been run over by a Hummer. Alternately, your doctors may choose to irradiate you in one of several ways, which is not altogether unlike being shoved into a microwave oven on "high" for a few minutes. Your medications probably won't make you feel better, so do yourself a favor and buy some weed. Get used to needles; you're going to be poked with a lot of them. Be strong, and you might live. Good luck! (John Reeves Hall, 1980-2005)
posted by NorthernSky
at 3:20 AM - 31 comments
February 4, 2006
February 3, 2006
February 2, 2006
does a motorcyclist have to be before you see them? [link is qt video] As was recommended by the original poster, put down any beverage; this will probably startle you.
(from livejournal's motorcyles community) [you bet there's more inside!]
posted by Eideteker
at 4:02 PM - 137 comments
Comic artist Seth Fisher died unexpectedly; this rotten news led to a session wallowing in his
online gallery to see one side of what the world lost. But, with so many comic artists putting galleries online, why wait until someone's gone to appreciate their work? You could admire the energy in
Mike Wieringo's figures, or the stylized coolness of
Cameron Stewart. You could bask in the freaky genius of
Mike Allred, or scratch your head and wonder how
Phil Bond's characters feel so real with such weird proportions. You could look to the future with
Ryan Sook, or, if you're more into the retro thing, there's always the old standby
John Byrne.
posted by COBRA!
at 9:50 AM - 22 comments
February 1, 2006
January 31, 2006
January 30, 2006
passed away on
Sunday. We'll read
educated commentaries in the next few days, but what I most affectionately remember about him is how his work made me laugh happily during the 70s and 80s. A precursor of video art, he was the first to use plugged tv sets as building blocks in the most
playful ways. His
TV Buddha is arguably an unsurpassed classic (a motionless moving image, an outside observation of an inner meditation, even -why not?- a premonition of a blogger) (this last one is a joke: I told you Paik made me laugh). R.I.P.
posted by bru
at 3:36 PM - 34 comments
has passed away at the age of 19. In addition to being in "Dances with Wolves" with Kevin Costner, Cody was also in the film .Radio Flyer.. He also appeared in several commercials, and even appeared with Jay Leno. Last spring, he traveled to the U.S. Mint in Washington, D.C., to participate in the unveiling of a new buffalo-head nickel.
posted by drstein
at 1:31 PM - 11 comments
January 29, 2006
She wanted to honor her son, to celebrate his life, however short. That's why she had refused an abortion, even after doctors told her that her little boy would be born without a brain.
posted by matteo
at 3:14 AM - 73 comments
January 28, 2006
January 27, 2006
Arf, Arf, he goes,
a merry sight
Our little hairy friend
Arf, Arf, upon the lampost bright
Arfing round the bend.
Nice dog! Goo boy,
Waggie tail and beg,
Clever
AIBO,
jump for joy,
Because we are putting you to sleep at three of the clock,
AIBO.
with apologies to john lennon (thanks
piratebowling )
posted by three blind mice
at 4:17 AM - 24 comments
January 24, 2006
January 23, 2006
Amazing aerial photographs by Olivo Barbieri, who uses a tilt-shift lens to create the startling effect of looking at a city model. Article by
metropolismag.com
posted by zardoz
at 6:02 AM - 67 comments
January 22, 2006
January 21, 2006
shot in Sonora, CA. I'm not a UFO nut, but this sighting's different. Thought y'all might enjoy it.
Did I mention the UFO explodes? And it's definitely not a
meteor.
posted by tritisan
at 10:58 PM - 63 comments
January 20, 2006
Wikipedia wrangling once more: the entire German edition
was shut down this week over the contents of a
single entry. The parents of the article's subject, a German hacker who died in 1998 under
mysterious circumstances, are displeased with his real name being disclosed in the encyclopedia. It is now back online; however, the future of the family's efforts is currently unclear, not only due to the German order's debatable validity in the US - but also because the order was, initially at least,
mistakenly addressed to St. Petersburg, Russia, instead of St. Petersburg, Florida.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
at 1:35 PM - 18 comments
January 19, 2006
Pickett, one of
greatest stars in the
Stax stable, the singer of such classics as "In The Midnight Hour," and "Mustang Sally," (the latter a standard for just about every R&B singer and garage band in the world) has died of a heart attack. he was 64.
posted by jonmc
at 3:57 PM - 62 comments
January 18, 2006
January 17, 2006
Russian man has tumor removed from his back..but it.s really a 35-year-old embryo that should have been his twin brother.
posted by goldism
at 10:42 AM - 82 comments
January 16, 2006
Jackie Robinson, Civil Rights Advocate.
(more inside)
posted by matteo
at 12:26 PM - 12 comments
January 15, 2006
January 14, 2006
It was pretty sad today to see that Shelley Winters died. She was a better actress than most of her movies and a bit of a
hottie before she outlived her
peers and lost her physical appeal. Nice to see that the trolls used the occasion to
bash her pretty mercilessly, mostly focusing on her weight and overwhelming a condolence board. Is there any topic people can be
civil on? How long before someone loses their
shirt and unmoderated forums/comments become a thing of the past?
posted by jbielby
at 2:57 PM - 71 comments
January 13, 2006
January 12, 2006
, best known as half of German trance duo
Jam & Spoon, was
found dead today, apparently of a heart attack at age 41. Jam and Spoon aren't well known in the mainstream, but they almost single handedly invented the dance music genre today known as "Progressive Trance" with their early 90s singles
"Stella" and
"Age of Love" (Short MP3 samples).
posted by empath
at 10:07 AM - 38 comments
January 10, 2006
January 9, 2006
is dead?
And, according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
posted by The Jesse Helms
at 1:22 PM - 102 comments
January 6, 2006
You'll never find... A "velvety baritone" like Lou Rawls, who died Friday of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai in LA. He moved with his mother from Chicago in the 1950s, was a friend of Sam Cooke, and sang the National Anthem at Game 2 of the 2005 World Series
in Chicago. Rawls sang with
Sam Cooke, was awarded three Grammys, sold one platinum and five gold albums. He said: There are no limits to music, so why should I
limit myself?"
posted by SeeAych4
at 11:00 PM - 31 comments
Clearer than you've ever seen before. Amazing and disturbing (from kottke).
posted by kdern
at 2:32 PM - 97 comments
The half-century old
2nd Ave Deli in New York City's East Village has closed; its rent was hiked 37% to $33,000 per month. The closure is described as temporary, but the owner acknowledges that it might open next "to clear out." [MI]
posted by rkent
at 6:41 AM - 222 comments
January 4, 2006
David Letterman, the usually apolitical host who's generally much more concerned with making his guests look good, loses it when guest Bill O'Reilly takes Cindy Sheehan to task on his show. You may remember O'Reilly having
a similarly awkward encounter with Jon Stewart earlier this year.
posted by mkultra
at 8:20 AM - 377 comments
January 3, 2006
"I've had some time to sleep and some time to think about the past two days. It's a blur. I don't often like revealing my thought processes about my work and reporting, but I need to decompress. Here's what I remember, unedited and kinda raw."
posted by nospecialfx
at 8:38 PM - 50 comments
December 30, 2005
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 by caddis
at 1:31 PM - 47 comments
December 26, 2005
, a character actor who appeared in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Buckaroo Banzai,
Amadeus,
Death to Smoochie and a ton of other films. A cult favorite, he was one of those actors you looked at and thought, "who
is that guy?".
posted by dbiedny
at 2:06 PM - 81 comments
December 21, 2005
"...The press tends to shy away from covering America's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, fearing precisely the kind of scolding President Bush delivered to the New York Times. But the truth is that the NSA.which has an estimated $6 billion annual budget bigger than those of the CIA and the FBI combined.has a decidedly checkered history when it comes to playing by the rules." And yet, NSA abuse seems not limited to Bush. Now, possib ly,
Carter and Clinton also used NSA for spying on civilians.
That said, NSA seems also to have been used for non-miltary spying,
to help selected American firms compete against rival companies elsewhere.
What is curious about this agency is that it is the single biggest intelligence organization in our country and yet so few people know what they do, where they are, what they had been legally allowed to do. If, as we are told, tapping phones is necessary in our fight against terror, why then doesn't the FBI do this? If any mobster worth his blackjack knows not to use phones because they are potentially tapped, why are we told that NSA doesn't want terrorists alerted to our tapping their phones and therefore there ought not to be any discussion of this "strategy."?
In sum, my suspicion is that a lot more is going on than we have thus far been told, and that in fact email and the internet are more involved in what is taking place than is phone tapping.
posted by Postroad
at 4:27 AM - 134 comments
December 20, 2005
Graphic, violent images that are both horrifying and mesmerising. [via
Digg]
posted by Elpoca
at 11:25 AM - 56 comments
December 19, 2005
December 16, 2005
is a short film on the recent riots in France. It was made by
Alex Chan, Parisan-born but of Chinese parents, to "to correct what was being said in the media, especially in the United States" about the riots. He used a
techinique called
machinima--using a video game engine to make his movie.
posted by LarryC
at 4:36 PM - 39 comments
December 15, 2005
December 14, 2005
- Penn & Teller call
Bullshit! on the "bestselling book in the world," the Holy Bible.
(link is to entire episode approx 29mins - *language, flash)
posted by hypersloth
at 4:41 AM - 120 comments
December 13, 2005
December 12, 2005
December 11, 2005
: A funny read from a couple guys that seem to really
really hate hipsters.
posted by starscream
at 5:22 PM - 77 comments
December 10, 2005
December 9, 2005
It does not come as a shock, as mentioned
in this thread from may of this year he has been ill. However, as with Zelazney I considered him a great science fiction writer. An end of an era is fast approaching.
posted by edgeways
at 9:14 PM - 27 comments
I must be turning into an old sentimental fool: I understand the technical and practical reasons to retire them, yet I think it's sad.
posted by blogenstock
at 8:21 AM - 27 comments
December 8, 2005
December 7, 2005
64 Years ago today, 2,471 people were killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In response, one of our greatest leaders made one of his greatest speeches. And you can listen to it here.
posted by Mayor Curley
at 8:09 AM - 85 comments
December 6, 2005
December 3, 2005
December 1, 2005
November 29, 2005
November 28, 2005
November 26, 2005
November 25, 2005
Footballer George Best has died today from an infection after a protracted iillness due to ill health following his battles with alcoholism.
A great
talent he was famous for his good looks, ability and love of the ladies.
"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars - the rest I just squandered."
Rest in peace Besty.
posted by ClanvidHorse
at 5:28 AM - 70 comments
November 24, 2005
The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the name of Christianity.
posted by j-urb
at 10:49 AM - 55 comments
November 23, 2005
Some of you might remember
Bill Harris, who credited his "miracle kitty" named, well, Miss Kitty, for saving his life during Hurricane Katrina. He died today at age 63. Video of their reunion
here. (imbedded .asf)
posted by Cyrano
at 3:56 PM - 9 comments
November 22, 2005
In 2001 America
destroyed the Kabul offices of al-Jazeera with two smartbombs; officials said it was an accident. In 2003 America
destroyed the Baghdad offices of al-Jazeera with missiles; officials said it was an accident. Now, two British civil servants are on trial for leaking a memo revealing that Bush intended to bomb al-Jazeera...
at their headquarters in allied Qatar.
posted by Pretty_Generic
at 8:28 AM - 155 comments
November 21, 2005
If you don't live in the Dallas area or listen to
KERA "on the sly," as Glenn used to say, you have no idea who Glenn Mitchell was. If he had lived a few months longer, you would have heard him on
XM Radio starting in early 2006. Possibly the best interviewer of our age. He left us far to early. Check out the
forum to see what he meant to his listeners. Rest in peace, Glenn.
posted by Doohickie
at 11:07 AM - 18 comments
November 20, 2005
November 15, 2005
"Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed."
Woodward's statement. [PDF] The unnamed official isn't Libby or Rove.
[via]
posted by kirkaracha
at 8:52 PM - 103 comments
November 14, 2005
Though I already went on and on about this on another thread, I can't shake it: Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged ten years ago. All he did was point out that Shell so scarred, pitted and slimed his tribal Ogoni lands that it was spontaneously catching fire. Oil company cronies showed up with guns, cleared villages. And then Nigerian government officials got
pissed, and nine Ogoni were hanged.
Wiki. Testimony of his
brother. His
foundation.
posted by toma
at 4:18 AM - 14 comments
November 13, 2005
November 12, 2005
Peter Drucker; the Prince of Management, dead at 95. He was a
visionary leader to many. I tried to look up some opposing views and could not readily find any. Peace out.
posted by Mr T
at 10:40 PM - 22 comments
Sadly, the education of the youth of amerika is declining in more than one way. The other day I was at the grocery store and the checker was unable to identify a portabello mushroom. And no, she wasn't new...and to make matters worse the checker next to her didn't know either. (more inside)
posted by MiHail
at 9:25 AM - 1027 comments
November 11, 2005
There was no official announcement -- there rarely is when the networks wield the ax -- but after two and a half wonderfully funny seasons, Fox's Emmy-winning "Arrested Development' is dead. It's not like no one saw this coming, but who the hell are all the people watching
Nanny 911 and
So You Think You Can Dance instead of the best show on TV?
posted by TunnelArmr
at 4:19 PM - 203 comments
Very emotional piece by the Rocky Mountain News where they shadow'ed a Marine that is responsible for notifying next-of-kin. Seeing as today is Veteran's Day, how 'bout we salute our men and women in uniform ... and leave the political discussions for other forums.
posted by RonZ
at 7:49 AM - 42 comments
November 10, 2005
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
posted by wilful
at 4:04 PM - 75 comments
It's been 30 years since Lake Superior November gales claimed the Great Lakes ore freighter Edmund Fitzgerald.
The sinking immortalized in song by
Gordon Lightfoot is also documented at the
Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum on a spit of land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a mere squinting distance on a clear day from where the Fitz actually went down.
Here in Detroit, of course, the bells will ring at
Mariner's Church -- where a lone priest reacted to the sinking by ringing the church's bells 29 times, once for each man lost.
(previously discussed (kinda)
here (
among others)
posted by chandy72
at 6:27 AM - 46 comments
November 8, 2005
The Kansas School Board has decided that it knows much more about the origins of life than the combined intelligence of all the scientists on the planet, and that fiction can be taught as fact. But seriously, if you don't even understand the scientific method, what business do you have setting academic policy?
posted by gallois
at 5:37 PM - 187 comments
November 7, 2005
Today
Rainews 24 part of RAI Television (Italian possible equivalent of PBS) broadcasted on a satellite channel a short documentary concerning the conquest of
Falluja city. The documentary presents many images and allegations suggesting that U.S. army probably used
White Phosphorous on the city during the offensive of 8 November 2004 with devastating consequences on civilians and insurgents. The substance is used on battlefield for
purposes including
production of dense smoke (M156) and also for
incendiary purposes.(Warning, disturbing pictures of dead people). Direct link goes to documentary,
English audio WMV link here. NSFW, extremely graphic, and very disturbing. Previous reference
[1]
here on Meta.
posted by elpapacito
at 5:48 PM - 55 comments
"I know I have a reputation as a cantankerous man of letters and I don't try and play it down" - John Fowles in 2003. One of the contemporary greats, author of
The French Lieutenant's Woman,
The Collector,
The Magus... there seems like there should be more articles on this, but alas.
posted by eatdonuts
at 9:12 AM - 19 comments
November 6, 2005
Mana "China" Nishiura, drummer for Shonen Knife & DMBQ, died on Friday afternoon.
"It is with a deep sadness in my heart, that I must announce the passing of Mana "China" Nishiura. She was tragically killed in a three-vehicle accident near the Delaware Memorial Bridge yesterday (November 4) shortly before 1 p.m., after the Econoline van carrying her band, DMBQ, had crossed the bridge from New Jersey near Carneys Point in Salem County. A Mitsubishi Eclipse clipped the van's left rear fender. The van spun out of control, and careened over a barrier on the ramp to Route 40. Mana was ejected from the van and she died at the scene." A bit more about Shonen Knife.
posted by jenleigh
at 1:46 PM - 48 comments
November 4, 2005
According to
Dan Froomkin today, Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to the secretary of state) said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.
posted by shiska
at 12:27 PM - 52 comments
November 2, 2005
We're several thousand feet down, where the pressure is about 3300 psi. The pressure inside that pipe? About zero. The crab? A goner.
posted by lunalaguna
at 11:58 AM - 80 comments
November 1, 2005
Although the true hardcore won't be bothered -- because they never leave Brooklyn on the weekends -- this might cramp the style of the rest.
posted by MattD
at 7:21 AM - 250 comments
October 29, 2005
October 28, 2005
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby indicted on two counts of Perjury, two counts of Making False statements and one count of Obstruction of Justice. All of which are felonies. It is expected Libby will tender his resignation today.
posted by SirOmega
at 9:48 AM - 320 comments
October 26, 2005
The Chicago White Sox have swept the series.
posted by wfrgms
at 9:51 PM - 74 comments
October 25, 2005
October 24, 2005
This weekend, Astroworld (I refuse to prepend "Six Flags") will close its doors. Envisioned in 1968 by
Judge Roy Hofheinz (who also brought us Houstonians a
major league baseball team, and a
stadium in which they could play), the amusement park was where I spent a lot of my childhood in the 70s.
Grass roots movements to save the park have
failed, and thus it's time to say goodbye to the place that played host to one of the
best rollercoasters in the world, a ride that
scared the crap out of me, a
double ferris wheel with a twist, as well as the
Boogie Fog Disco, where I learned how to do The Hustle. All's not lost, as at least I can download the
Texas Cyclone, but I still feel a little misty-eyed for the boy who spent most of his weekends in this magical and wondrous place. Farewell.
posted by WolfDaddy
at 8:56 PM - 58 comments
October 23, 2005
--so there's this soldier in Iraq with a blog,
All The King's Horses. He usually complains a little, tells readers about what he does, talks about the stop-loss thing that's keeping him in Iraq, etc. So, the
Operation Truth site posts something by him, and the next thing you know, the blog is dead, and an unwilling public apology and retraction and statement of support for Bush and his leadership is posted.
... it breaks my heart to say that this will be my last post on this blog. I wish I could just stop there, but I can not. The following also needs to be said:
For the record, I am officially a supporter of the administration and of her policies. ...
posted by amberglow
at 3:29 PM - 77 comments
October 21, 2005
a game of skill, designed not only to challenge one's hand-eye coordination, but to stimulate strategic thinking as well."
posted by sciurus
at 9:55 AM - 23 comments
October 20, 2005
The 2004 International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources'
Red List of Threatened Species.
posted by Gyan
at 1:35 PM - 6 comments
The bodies were positioned to face Mecca and burned -- an act of desecration that violates Islamic burial rites and the Geneva Conventions. A U.S. PsyOps specialist
broadcast an inflammatory message to the nearby town in order to incite an attack.
"Attention, Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to come down and retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be."
The video
aired last night in Australia, but hasn't surfaced yet in the U.S.
It won't be long, though..
"Wow, look at the blood coming out of the mouth on that one, fucking straight death metal."
posted by insomnia_lj
at 3:18 AM - 237 comments
October 19, 2005
Another trouble maker can't keep her mouth shut !Bunny Greenhouse was once the perfect bureaucrat, an insider, the top procurement official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know.
posted by Postroad
at 10:31 AM - 23 comments
October 16, 2005
He could not walk. Robert Loria was flown home for a long recovery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he tried to bear up against intense physical pain and reimagine his life's possibilities
...
But nine months after Loria was wounded, the Army garnished his wages and then, as he prepared to leave the service, hit him with a $6,200 debt. That was just before last Christmas, and several lawmakers scrambled to help. This spring, a collection agency started calling. He owed another $646 for military housing.
...
posted by zouhair
at 2:58 PM - 68 comments
(archive link) The blend of businessmen's aversion to government regulation, down-home cultural populism and Christian moralism that sustains today's Republican Party is a venerable if loosely knit philosophy of government dating back to long before the right-wing upsurge that prepared the way for Reagan's presidency. A few pundits and political insiders have likened the current Republicans to the formidable, corporate-financed political machine behind President William McKinley at the end of the 19th century. The admiration Karl Rove has expressed for the machine strengthens the historical connection. Of course, the Whigs couldn't hold their disparate coalition together in the face of the slavery issue. What might undo the current disparate coalition in the GOP?
posted by caddis
at 3:16 AM - 29 comments
October 14, 2005
October 13, 2005
October 12, 2005
In 1985,
DC Comics released
Crisis On Infinite Earths -- arguably the biggest
retcon engine in comicbook history. The
goal of the
Crisis maxi-series was the unification of
disparate DC timelines and dimensions (designated as numbered or lettered Earths) into a single universe.
Beloved heroes died and
new heroes emerged.
Twenty years later, DC is putting all of its heroes and villains back in harm's way with
Infinite Crisis. Building steam from plot elements in last year's
critically-acclaimed Identity Crisis (written by NYT Bestselling Author
Brad Meltzer) and a quartet (
1,
2,
3,
4) of related mini-series published over the last six months,
Infinite Crisis (penned by
Geoff Johns) promises to be just as jarring as the original
Crisis. So jarring, in fact, that flagship characters of the DC Universe
will be pitched forward in time, a year into the future. To account for the lost time, a
weekly series called
52* will start in May of 2006.
And when the dust settles, DC will start progressing all of its characters and stories
in real time.
posted by grabbingsand
at 6:29 AM - 53 comments
October 11, 2005
The shirt in question bore the phrase "Meet the F*ckers" and an image of US President Bush, VP Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. The passenger, Lorrie Heasley, refused to remove it after other passengers complained. Apparently "Southwest rules filed with the FAA say they can remove a passenger that is offensive, abusive, disorderly or violent or for clothing that is "lewd, obscene, or patently offensive," but the airline says the curse (not the political message) led to her being asked to leave. Ms. Heasley is now speaking with the ACLU to see if she can initiate a lawsuit, but the NYTimes checked with experts in constitutional law and they
don't think she has a case.
Well, the makers of the t-shirt have responded:
"If any T-Shirt Hell customer is kicked off of any commercial airline flight simply for wearing one of our shirts, we will provide you with alternate transportation to get you to your original destination. This transportation includes, but is not limited to, the T-Shirt Hell corporate jet."
posted by zarq
at 12:26 PM - 221 comments
October 10, 2005
is a thumbnail blog of cool stuff for your house, like
Uncrate, but just for house related purchases.
posted by jonson
at 4:12 PM - 29 comments
October 9, 2005
October 5, 2005
October 4, 2005
Recognizable mostly as the subject of
Genghis Blues, his incredible success teaching himself
Tuvan throat singing will hopefully not be completely overshadowed by having written Steve Miller's hit "Big Old Jet Airliner." His early recordings, which never caught on (or necessarily came out), earned him favorable comparisons to Hendrix, and are available at
his website.
posted by Eothele
at 1:35 PM - 34 comments
The opposite of pro is con
That fact is clearly seen
If progress means move forward
Then what does Congress mean?
posted by me3dia
at 12:19 PM - 33 comments
October 3, 2005
October 1, 2005
It looks like this is not going to be a destination for some time. Fuck. [
via]
posted by tellurian
at 10:25 AM - 23 comments
September 29, 2005
September 26, 2005
(and, if you can handle it,
RPS-25) for when traditional "Rock, Paper, Scissors" is just not enough.
posted by Robot Johnny
at 1:54 PM - 25 comments
September 20, 2005
Bananas are awesome. Popular Science has an article about how they are going extinct. Apparently in the early 1900's the main variety of banana died out and was replaced by what we know today. According to this article, it's happening again.
o/~ Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Stack banana till de mornin' come
Daylight come and me wan' go home o/~
posted by crocos
at 12:34 AM - 49 comments
September 19, 2005
2 british soldiers, presumably special forces shot at police, were arrested. then the brit army (this in basra) wanted them. police refused, a RIOT broke out, one brit tracked vehicle burned, 3 personnel injured. 100+ prisoners escaped when the British broke a wall down in the jail
Okay, I'm pretty sure this could have been handled differently...
posted by Elim
at 3:31 PM - 76 comments
September 17, 2005
He free to say whatever he wants now, so he chats on about everything from AIDS in China to global warming to Roswell (Yes, that Roswell) at the recent CPSA Investor's Forum in Hong Kong.
Part 1,
Part 2.
posted by gimonca
at 4:25 PM - 65 comments
Today, Canadians are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the life and death our greatest hero -
Terry Fox.
I was only 10 years old when
Terry dipped his artificial leg in the Atlantic ocean and began his run across Canada with the aim of raising just $1 for each Canadian.
Sadly,
he had to end his run after only the halfway point when the Cancer spread to his lungs.
Terry passed away less than a year later.
Terry Fox runs worldwide have raised exponential amounts more than Terry could have ever imagined.
He makes me proud to be Canadian, and I still get choked up thinking about him.
posted by SSinVan
at 3:49 PM - 31 comments
September 16, 2005
...After the raid, an Iraqi informer walked among detainees, pointing them out to U.S. troops. Despite being disguised with a bag over his head, the informer was recognized by his fellow villagers by his yellow sandals and his amputated thumb. His name was Sabah. ...The next day, his father and brother, carrying AK-47s, entered his room before dawn and took him behind the house. With trembling hands, the father fired twice... Sabah's brother then fired three times, once at his brother's head, killing him. Sitting with the father later, Shadid found himself unable to ask the question he knew that as a journalist he had to ask: Had he killed his son? "In a moment so tragic, so wretched, there still had to be decency. I didn't want to hear him say yes. I didn't want to humiliate him any further. In the end, I didn't have to." "'I have the heart of a father, and he's my son,' he told me, his eyes cast to the ground. 'Even the prophet Abraham didn't have to kill his son.' He stopped, steadying his voice. 'There was no other choice.'"What went wrong That's from the Salon review of
Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by
Anthony Shadid [+]
posted by y2karl
at 1:15 PM - 15 comments
Ars Technica digs deep and finds out just how much abuse the Nano can take (Hint:
alot) before the music stops. And then performs an
autopsy on
it.
Warning, do not click link if the abuse of electronic items makes you queasy or sad.
posted by fenriq
at 12:07 PM - 26 comments
September 13, 2005
: while this may not hit the US press for some time, the UK's Mail on Sunday reports that doctors in New Orleans chose to euthanize patients who were dying in agony and had no chance of survival during the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.
posted by grapefruitmoon
at 4:03 PM - 180 comments
September 11, 2005
I've never posted a link before and don't mean to create any debate or make any statement. I just thought that before the day was out we do the obvious and remember.
posted by brautigan
at 1:46 PM - 136 comments
Things ain't what they used to be. Blues, jazz, Cajun and country music great Clarence
Gatemouth Brown
dies at 81. Brown safely evacuated his home in Slidell, but was said to be broken hearted by the devastation wreaked by Katrina on his beloved Louisiana.
Alligator bio (sound alert).
posted by madamjujujive
at 10:52 AM - 31 comments
September 9, 2005
Are these the words of a long-haired hippy? A neutral Swiss? A flip-flopping Democrat? A Frenchman in mid-surrender? Nope. It's from a
speech by Texas Republican
Ron Paul.
posted by Jatayu das
at 4:44 AM - 30 comments
September 8, 2005
September 6, 2005
Said today while visiting relief efforts at the Houston Astrodome:
"Almost everyone I've talked to said we're going to move to Houston. What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. (Said with concern.) Everybody is so overwhelmed by all the hospitality. And so many of the peoples in the arena here, you know, they're underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
I'd be curious what she'd think after
after living there for just a week, much less for months on end, before being sent off to somewhere even further from their homes, friends, and relatives.
Please note: This woman raised our president. Did the acorn fall far from the tree?
posted by insomnia_lj
at 1:32 AM - 203 comments
September 4, 2005
LA National Guard Wants Equipment to Come Back From Iraq
posted by theora55
at 11:26 AM - 11 comments
"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night."
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans damns FEMA on Tim Russett this morning. (WMV clip)
posted by madamjujujive
at 9:50 AM - 202 comments
September 3, 2005
and on Fox News! For those old enough to remember, it's so significant that Geraldo Rivera says of conditions in the New Orleans Convention Center, "it's like Willowbrook in there." (Rivera became famous in 1972 by
exposing the horrendous conditions in a home for the mentally retarded called Willowbrook; finally, after decades of degrading himself, he remembers what his job is.) And Slate's Jack Shafer on "
the rebellion of the talking heads" -- the refusal of reporters on the ground in New Orleans to regurgitate the official spin. [via
TalkLeft]
posted by digaman
at 9:08 AM - 100 comments
September 1, 2005
August 31, 2005
(Reuters link)
The invention of a South African woman, the rapex anti-rape female condom (worn like a tampon) has sharp barbs in it that lock into the rapist's penis and need to be removed surgically which makes it pretty easy to notify the police. Opponents are, understandably, concerned about an escalation of violence against the rape victim.
Rape statistics are
sobering and
saddening with some estimates that women,
children and
even babies are
raped every 26 seconds in South Africa though Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, has
refuted the findings. Virgins are highly sought for rape as there is an urban myth that
sex with a virgin will cure HIV/AIDS.
posted by fenriq
at 2:53 PM - 60 comments
August 28, 2005
New Orleans television stations
WWL
and
WDSU
are providing nonstop live coverage of Hurricane Katrina. The
Mississippi Department Of
Transportation has live cams along the major highways which show the massive evacuation of the coastal areas of Louisiana and Mississippi including the metropolitan areas of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. With gusts of 207 MPH this could set a new record for the largest hurricane to ever hit the United
States.
posted by robliberal
at 12:25 PM - 624 comments
August 27, 2005
Mandatory evacuations have been declared, and contraflow evacuation routes are in effect near New Orleans, as
Hurricane Katrina, a very wet, drenching hurricane,
approaches the city from the Gulf of Mexico, where it is gaining in size and strength, with an estimated
45% chance of making landfall as a category 4 or 5 hurricane. The
computer models suggest that New Orleans will sustain a direct hit from Katrina, which could be
"The Big One" warned about by experts, capable of
flooding the city, polluting it with industrial waste, and even flooding the pump stations, leaving it incapable of pumping out the water. The hurricane is predicted to make landfall early Monday near
Port Fourchon, which handles approximately
13% of U.S. oil imports, and 27% of U.S. domestic production.
posted by insomnia_lj
at 6:21 PM - 272 comments
August 26, 2005
The FBI has issued the first
demand for library records under the Patriot Act. The library in question is somewhere in Bridgeport, CT. The
ACLU is seeking an emergency court order to lift the FBI gag order, but they've been instructed by the gag to keep the person whose library records being sought (i.e., their client) a secret. What the ACLU has revealed is that the client is a member of the American Library Association (clearly, a front for terrorism). If any MeFites are interested in digging up additional details on this and start making calls,
here's a good place to start. What indeed would the FBI consider so threatening?
posted by ed
at 10:46 AM - 57 comments
"I am amicably leaving the Drudge Report after a long and close working relationship with Matt Drudge... I am also excited to be a partner in an inspired new endeavor, the
Huffington Post." This was written May 26th but Drudge is linking to this "raucous, opinionated, red meat eating libertarian-leaning conservative"
more than ever.
posted by j.p. Hung
at 8:22 AM - 28 comments
Thomas Strickland died on August 15, 2005, in
Al Mahmudiyah, Iraq, after
several harrowing ordeals.
He left behind
his journal and
numerous war poems, such as
"Cheers to suicide! So Where's my Martini?" and
"Terrer be a Cancer Today", parts one and two.
Could he be the
Wilfred Owen of the Iraq War?
"Humanity, I think, is what fills the little gaps between all the broken shit, all the breaking, and all the plans, schematics, graphics and orders. Its the sand slipping out of grasping fingers. Its our instinct without progress as a motivator. It's who we are when we concentrate on being more than doing."
posted by insomnia_lj
at 4:53 AM - 30 comments
August 25, 2005
He created
Infiltration, the zine that documented and instructed the practice of "urban exploration" (spelunking in buildings where you're not supposed to go). Discovering his zine led me to understand that my lengthy time-killing in the catacombs of the Ontario provincial government was an activity with an actual name - and purpose. Chapman, a liver-transplant recipient, died in Toronto of cancer at age 31.
Details from his wife. (
Previous mention)
posted by joeclark
at 4:32 PM - 29 comments
August 23, 2005
An Open Letter to young Ryland Kallman
(to be delivered on the occasion of his 18th birthday)
Dear Ryland: We, the citizens of the internet, apologize for the way in which you were raised, and we will try to bear in mind the adversity you faced as an child before passing judgement on your actions as an adult. Thanks to
this article we were all aware of the psychic trauma inflicted by your mother (aka "The Martha Stewart of Parenting."), but as simple bloggers and computer programmers, we were powerless to stop this abuse. It is our hope that upon this day of the symbolic beginning of your adult life, you will be able to read this history of your early years, and to reflect on the toxic culture of insecurity and fear that was the undoing of so many good people of your parents' generation. It may be difficult to face these facts, but chances are you're reading this online, and (assuming the internet is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walmart by 2023) there are millions of people here who can help you work through these issues. Also Ryland, we apologize for your name.
posted by idontlikewords
at 11:59 AM - 128 comments
August 22, 2005
Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a former presidential candidate,
said on "The 700 Club" it was the United States' duty to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a "launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism."
posted by billysumday
at 8:51 PM - 300 comments
August 21, 2005
has passed away after battling a brain tumor for several months. There aren't any news stories up yet, but simply key his name into
Google and it's plain to see his influence on every aspect of music. The family has a
caringbridge page filled with tributes and several journal entries.
posted by teletype1
at 8:50 PM - 77 comments
August 19, 2005
After winning a landmark eminent domain ruling from the Supreme Court, the New London Development Corporation now wants to pay residents based on value they held in 2000, rather then 2005, which would leave them unable to buy equivalent new home in today's real estate bubble.
Then also want to charge back rent. In some cases up to $300 thousand. Susette Kelo herself now owes $56k.
posted by delmoi
at 8:34 AM - 66 comments
August 18, 2005
If you're of a certain age, you might remember a brief period in the late eighties when this two-hit wonder was all over the radio; unavoidable. Now, he's...
a fish.
posted by bunglin jones
at 10:11 PM - 60 comments
August 17, 2005
August 16, 2005
owner of the fiercely independent
Southern Records and
Southern Studios, has died. In addition to championing many of the past couple of decade's best independent bands (
Shellac,
The Jesus Lizard,
Jesus and Mary Chain,
Fugazi,
Minor Threat,
Crass), he was a brilliant recording engineer and mastering specialist, responsible for overseeing some underground classics (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6). Mourners are requested to wear
T-shirts and jeans. Rest in peace, John. You'll be missed.
posted by nylon
at 11:37 AM - 21 comments
. A passenger plane crashed in remote western Venezuela with 152 passengers aboard early Tuesday, an aviation official said. A top government official said it was unlikely anyone survived.
posted by Rothko
at 6:09 AM - 40 comments
August 15, 2005
August 14, 2005
Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange
died over the weekend. His loss will impact our country considerably . he championed our anti-nuclear policy which led to the end of
Anzus and a falling out with the US that
continues to this day, he spoke at the
Oxford Union defending our stance on nuclear weapons and power and he was Prime Minister presiding over the far reaching
economic reform that has arguably led to the economic prosperity Kiwi.s are
enjoying right now. He was a man larger than life, funny, friendly and caring and his passing is being felt all over
Godzone.
posted by Samuel Farrow
at 6:00 PM - 25 comments
It is reported that there were 115 passengers and 6 crew aboard.
According to the folks on airliners.net, shortly after take-off, the pilots reported some sort of problem with the cockpit air conditioning. Radio contact was then lost. The Greek air force scrambled two F-16s; the pilots reported that when they looked through the cockpit window they could see the co-pilot slumped forward across the controls, and no sign of the captain. The airliner subsequently flew into a mountaintop near Athens.
posted by cstross
at 3:41 AM - 45 comments
A special report by the Observer reveals some of the key elements emerging from the ongoing investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Jean Charles de Menezes "wasn't wearing a heavy jacket.
He used his card to get into the station. He didn't vault the barrier. And now police say there are no CCTV pictures to reveal the truth." So now the inquiry will have to rely exclusively on eyewitnesses accounts. It appears the man they saw vaulting the barrier was one of the armed officers in plain clothes, while de Menezes "simply walked towards the platform unchallenged". The plainclothes armed unit that shot de Menezes was not the same team that had been following him from his London flat: "
there was a delay in calling an armed team to arrest de Menezes, which meant he had already entered the station by the time the officers arrived". Also, it appears that once inside the station, the armed officers had no radio contact with police on the outside. As new details emerge, more questions remain unanswered.
(As previously discussed
here and
here.)
posted by funambulist
at 2:42 AM - 87 comments
August 12, 2005
August 10, 2005
August 9, 2005
August 8, 2005
August 7, 2005
The 78 year old vaulted from relative obscurity - outside of Cuba, at least - to the forefront of the badly and over-generally named "International" or "World Music" scenes when he came out of retirement to perform with a number of past colleagues (including
Compay Segundo and
Ruben Gonzales) as Buena Vista Social Club. A
film, directed by Wim Wenders, and an album made with the help of guitarist
Ry Cooder cemented his position as one of the sweetest voices in
Cuba's rich musical history in the west and elsewhere. He was generally considered one of the greatest masters of the traditional
son and
bolero styles.
posted by luriete
at 12:44 AM - 36 comments
August 1, 2005
On mission along the border of Chad and Darfur, Human Rights Watch researchers gave children notebooks and crayons to keep them occupied while they spoke with the children's parents. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur.
Here are those drawings.
posted by ewagoner
at 8:18 AM - 16 comments
July 31, 2005
Tuesday, July 26th, 2005, was a
wet day for the city of Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay), to say the least. Within 12 hours, it rained
more than half the average annual rainfall.
Upwards of 400 people are believed to have died, with more in adjacent regions. In many regions, the water rose as
high as five feet. All transportation links to the rest of India were
severed. Within the city, many commuters who left work, for home, on Tuesday evening,
didn't reach home till Wednesday night. There have been substantial
financial and
ecological damages. The state apparatus was caught
offguard and proven
unprepared; the police were nowhere to be found, and the meteorological department found wanting with their warnings. The rumour-mongering of an incoming tsunami or cyclone also didn't help, as 24 people died in the resulting
stampede. Alas, just as one is relieved that the
ordeal is over, it appears there's yet
more to come.
posted by Gyan
at 5:57 PM - 16 comments
July 29, 2005
And they want to tear it down so we get another Walgreens? What do we need another Walgreens for?"
This spoken on a recent afternoon over a $1.75 can of Beck's by Ken Labonty, who works at a tire shop on the north side. At 47, he said he has been coming to the tavern since 1976, "Except from September 1977 to 1983, when I was in prison," and the eight or so times he's been banished
posted by Durwood
at 5:48 AM - 32 comments
July 27, 2005
[ wikipedia:
what's a cargo cult ? In short, yearning for Clinton-era economic prosperity got cultified. ]...OK. Here's the rap : Any day, Jesus Christ will return in a space ship bringing news that Bill Clinton signed a secret law in 2000 abolishing the IRS. The law, NESARA ,
"would expose the "Republican Party" for what they are: literally reptile space aliens posing as fiscal conservatives......And thus was a new religion born....Some people have asked, 'Why does Jesus need a spaceship'?". There's a
NESARA documentary, and
NESARA holds its own DC rallies. Story courtesy of
John Gorenfeld, a noted authority on
Lunar anomalies.
posted by troutfishing
at 10:23 PM - 25 comments
July 26, 2005
July 25, 2005
July 22, 2005
Apparently the
Ghazala Gardens hotel was heavily damaged in what appears to be a bomb attack, closely following 2 other bomb explosions in the well-know tourist city.
posted by elpapacito
at 4:20 PM - 37 comments
Charles Chibitty, the last survivor of the Comanche code talkers who used their native language to transmit messages for the Allies in Europe during World War II, has died. He was 83.
More info on the Code Talkers
posted by edmcbride
at 1:59 PM - 9 comments
July 21, 2005
Iran
executes two teenagers. Their crime? Making love. Homosexuality is a crime under
Sharia law. Meanwhile, newly "liberated" Iraq moves closer to embedding traditional Islamic laws in its new constitution,
reducing rights for women. Will
Iraqi gays be the next to suffer the wrath of "Allah's law" after years of secular oppression under Saddam Hussein?
posted by digaman
at 12:34 PM - 109 comments
July 20, 2005
The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's. He was best known for his role as Star Trek's Engineer Montgomery Scott.
posted by mrbill
at 9:11 AM - 126 comments
July 19, 2005
July 18, 2005
a man has appeared in US court accused of killing his baby son because of an irrational fear that he would become gay.
posted by brandz
at 6:51 PM - 91 comments
July 9, 2005
- With a Twist "The young girl and her mother are now trying to rebuild their lives after an 18-month campaign of harassment by Kathryn Skinner, the woman they thought was a trusted family friend. Skinner, now 40, spiked children's drinks at birthday parties and put razor blades in school bags and lockers so her friend's daughter would get the blame."
posted by echolalia67
at 9:18 PM - 54 comments
July 7, 2005
OK, the movie, The Wedding Crashers, doesn't look all that interesting to me, but I gotta say that the
Crash the Trailer viral ad that they whipped up is Awesome! You upload pictures of yourself or whomever, and they superimpose the pictures onto the faces of the stars of the movie. Very clever, or at least kind of fun for a second.
posted by willnot
at 6:07 PM - 18 comments
July 6, 2005
July 1, 2005
Somehow I missed this, and I assume others will have as well.
Booktv will rebroadcast a
lengthy interview with him July 2. Downloads available as well.
posted by IndigoJones
at 10:59 AM - 17 comments
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement.
posted by XQUZYPHYR
at 7:27 AM - 186 comments
June 29, 2005
June 28, 2005
June 27, 2005
the voice of Tigger passed away on June 24th at the age of 82. In addition to his famous voice, he also helped develop the artificial
heart , held over 30
patents, had a plan to feed the hungry with
tilapia, was a
ventriloquist and was the voice of
Gargamel. One day later the voice actor for
Piglet also passed away. With
Thurl Ravenscroft, the voice of Tony the Tiger, succumbing to prostate cancer in late May, it may be true that celebrities die in threes. Or does tiger voice actor
Jim Cummings have something to worry about?
posted by phirleh
at 12:15 PM - 16 comments
has died aged 61, after failing to recover fully from pneumonia and heart surgery. He will be sadly missed.
posted by mnemosyne
at 2:41 AM - 27 comments
June 26, 2005
June 25, 2005
June 23, 2005
June 22, 2005
June 21, 2005
by Allison Crews at age 17, teen mother advocate and activist.
"I had become garbage, worthy only to sit in my isolated desk and cry to myself and throw up in a dirty bathroom stall. I was a pregnant teenage girl.
" Allison died recently aged 22. She was active in
girl-mom.com, an online and in life support and education network for young mothers.
"To radically accept and defend a woman's right to choose, we must acknowledge the multiple ways that women come to make reproductive choices. By marginalizing teenage mothers, even within the feminist community, we are failing to recognize the realities of countless women and their children." There's a
report of her funeral and a
website has been set up to collect memories for Allison's 7 year old son. {Allison's
LJ}
All of this comes via
BitchPhD - her entry is also worth reading.
(previous semi-related MeFi)
posted by peacay
at 5:40 AM - 50 comments
June 20, 2005
WAITRESS
(challenging him)
You want me to hold the chicken.
BOBBY
Yeah. I want you to hold it between
your knees.
Lorna Thayer, who died June 4 at 85 after 40 years before the camera, was remembered for one brief appearance: the waitress on "
Five Easy Pieces." In that
memorable moment in the 1970 film, as the voice of authority opposite Jack Nicholson`s rebellious Bobby Dupea, a classical pianist turned oil rigger, the middle-aged Thayer proved to be a formidable foil in what has come to be known as
the "chicken salad scene."
posted by matteo
at 11:02 AM - 21 comments
June 17, 2005
The first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the August 1945 .
Fat Man. atomic attack had his newspaper stories censored and banned by US General Douglas MacArthur.s office. The reporter, George Weller, who worked for the (defunct) Chicago Daily News, was prevented from reporting on a mysterious .Disease X. out of fear that the stories of radiation poisoning would horrify the world and shift public attitudes regarding the bomb.
Weller died two years ago. Carbons of the articles were discovered by his son, Anthony.
Four of them were published today for the first time by the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun, which purchased them from Anthony Weller.
posted by zarq
at 8:34 AM - 83 comments
June 13, 2005
June 9, 2005
June 7, 2005
June 2, 2005
May 30, 2005
RIP
Oscar Brown Jr. Truly one of the greats, a legendary singer, songwriter, playwright, poet and civil rights activist, the world of jazz has lost a major member of the family.
posted by bluedaniel
at 10:38 PM - 7 comments
May 29, 2005
May 28, 2005
As Mr. Kimball might have said, he was an
actor . Well, not really an actor, but a war hero. He was awarded a Bronze star...well, it wasn't really bronze, more like a...anyway, for his efforts at
Tarawa. But maybe he was more of an
environmentalist...oh, anyway, dig into some
hotscakes and remember Mr. Douglas.
posted by Oriole Adams
at 1:34 PM - 20 comments
May 27, 2005
May 26, 2005
I just want to spread the immense joy of
Winamp TV, which is a route to all kinds of Filipino servers playing all your favourite copyrighted television material commercial-free 24/7 but it's OK because I'm not linking to those servers directly no sir.
posted by Pretty_Generic
at 3:27 PM - 87 comments
May 25, 2005
May 24, 2005
May 20, 2005
new information from Afghanistan. More torture of "terrorists," more deaths of prisoners, more untrained interrogators pummeling instead of interrogating.facts direct from a leaked Army investigation.
posted by Mo Nickels
at 6:42 AM - 83 comments
May 17, 2005
is just about the wackiest story I've heard from Cambodia. Then I noticed the URL. Used to settle a bet between friends (successfully tricking one friend), the
lions vs. midgets website has the full backstory on this spoof.
posted by mathowie
at 11:58 AM - 38 comments
May 12, 2005
May 10, 2005
May 9, 2005
This was the only possession of Lola Rein as she hid for seven months in a hole in the ground to escape the Nazis, and the only connection to the mother who had made it for her.
posted by scody
at 12:55 PM - 20 comments
May 6, 2005
Col. David Hackworth, who billed himself as America's most decorated living soldier (he had eight Purple Hearts and ten Silver Stars), died in Mexico
this week at age 74. Hackworth saw combat in World War II (having joined the Army at 15), Korea, and Vietnam; in 1967 he and
Gen. Samuel Marshall wrote the
Vietnam Primer, a "lessons learned" document prepared for the Army to explain how
not to fight a guerilla war. In 1971, after years in-country, Hackworth turned publically against the war, telling ABC News that it could not be won and moving to Australia, where his anti-nuclear efforts earned him a United Nations Medal for Peace. Hackworth was a distinguished war correspondent, a self-appointed advocate for the average soldier who used
his website as a soapbox, a best-selling
author, a critic of American tactics in the Iraq War, and possibly the only figure respected by both
WorldNetDaily and
Common Dreams.
posted by snarkout
at 9:34 AM - 33 comments
May 5, 2005
No, not Ralph Nader mumbling, but the lyrics to "
Louie Louie," in the FBI's humble assessment more than 40 years ago. Nevertheless, this week a Michigan school superintendent
banned a middle school marching band from playing the song... even without anyone singing the lyrics.
posted by twsf
at 10:27 AM - 47 comments
May 4, 2005
I can't find any major news outlets mentioning that
today is the 35th anniversary of the Kent State killings, when national guardsmen troops fired a fusillade of live bullets at unarmed students protesting the invasion of Cambodia. Not everyone has forgotten. A new
documentary, "Fire in the Heartland: A History of Dissent at Kent State University 1960-1980" was screened on campus today.
posted by tizzie
at 6:34 PM - 23 comments
May 3, 2005
May 2, 2005
April 30, 2005
April 28, 2005
According to the paper Dagbladet, it has been. "The Madonna" as well.
posted by absalom
at 5:42 PM - 75 comments
LATimes article about the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit's search for the
Disney World Girl. The article is haunting, horrifying and fasinating. They are looking for a child who is being actively molested and photographed. It's a disturbing read, but probably SFW. Previous background info discussed here
before.
Also note the odd additional Trekkie factoid
posted by theora55
at 10:16 AM - 162 comments
April 22, 2005
is the nickname given to Saleh Khalaf, a nine year old boy maimed by an explosion in Iraq. Deanne Fitzmaurice's photo essay about his ongoing recovery won the
2005 Pultizer Prize for Feature Photography.
posted by McGuillicuddy
at 10:37 AM - 19 comments
April 18, 2005
More mass graves unearthed in Iraq |
Investigators have discovered several mass graves in southern Iraq that are believed to contain the bodies of people killed by Saddam Hussein's government, including one estimated to hold 5,000 bodies, Iraqi officials say. If the estimated body counts prove correct, the new graves would be among the largest in the grim tally of mass killings that have gradually come to light since the fall of Saddam's government two years ago. At least 290 grave sites containing the remains of 300,000 people have been found since the U.S. invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials say. In the aftermath of Saddam's fall, thousands of Iraqis overran mass-grave sites, digging for their relatives' remains with backhoes, shovels, even their bare hands. More evidence of genocide was discovered in Spring 2003, and though
the numbers were disputed, the number of buried bodies discovered has continued to rise.
posted by jenleigh
at 9:05 AM - 161 comments
The life's work of Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old American activist, had become door-to-door polling in Iraq to assess the number of civilian casualties of the war. She became one on Sunday, dying in a
suicide bomb attack. "The Marines have nicknamed me Cluster Bomb Girl because I would hear of places where they had gone off," she said in a
2003 interview, "and I would ask them to help me clear the area."
posted by rcade
at 6:03 AM - 55 comments
April 15, 2005
: "Police at first could not believe what they had heard" - some reporters just have a gift for understatement.
posted by troutfishing
at 9:15 PM - 37 comments
April 13, 2005
Chuck Berry wrote "Johnny B. Goode" in tribute to Johnson. Johnson composed many of Chuck Berry's greatest songs on the piano. Berry then adapted them for guitar and wrote the lyrics.
posted by fixedgear
at 1:47 PM - 16 comments
April 11, 2005
feminist icon and scourge of pornographers, has died aged 58.
posted by Holly
at 1:37 PM - 138 comments
April 9, 2005
"This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep."
At least we enjoyed the
trailer!
posted by channey
at 6:37 PM - 98 comments
April 6, 2005
You may be shot, legally, of course!
posted by lee
at 10:00 PM - 105 comments
April 5, 2005
April 4, 2005
Author
Geralyn Lucas wore bright, red lipstick to her mastectomy. "It was my way of saying I knew I would still be a woman when I woke up with a blood-soaked bandage where my breast used to be... women have sacrificed breasts and hair to try to save their lives. We have traded in our beauty for some kind of cure. But
something strange often happens when we lose the bling . the big boobs and big hair . of womanhood. We're left with what I call '
inner cleavage,' and no plastic surgeon can sculpt it. It is the beauty that exists when everything else has been stripped away".
Lauren Greenfield photographs
here. More inside.
posted by matteo
at 11:59 AM - 19 comments
April 2, 2005
Pope John Paul II has died at age 84 in Vatican City.
"The Holy Father died this evening at 21.37 in his private apartment"
posted by SirOmega
at 12:07 PM - 327 comments
April 1, 2005
"
This is never easy. Please excuse me if I start making no sense. Hideaki Sekiguchi, AKA Billy, has left this world this morning, due to a heart attack at the age of 38. Billy was a brother, one of the wolf pack. He rocked harder than anybody in the room...." --Seiji, Guitar Wolf. Fans from all over the world
respond. Oh,
Bass Wolf, you will be in my heart forever.
posted by jennanemone
at 9:48 AM - 32 comments
Pope John Paul II has had a
heart attack. Soon, the
College
of
Cardinals will
assemble
to
choose
his successor. Even in death, however, this pontiff will exert extraordinary control over
the process, having
elevated an
unprecedented number of clerics to this body.
The choice of
Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino,
archbishop of Havana, would
continue
John Paul II's
legacy of opposition to communism and totalitarianism. Another frontrunner is the socially conservative Nigerian Cardinal
Francis Arinze.
Arinze would continue John Paul II's cultural legacy while
recognizing the
demographic reality
of modern global Catholicism. Also mentioned as a frontrunner is
Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga
of Honduras, a strong
proponent of third world debt relief. Progressives would welcome the elevation of German Cardinal
Walter Kasper,
an
advocate
for religious tolerance and pluralism, or the moderate Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re,
a frequent
stand-in
during the Holy Week ceremonies. Conservatives favor Columbian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos. Hoyos shares the Pope's
traditionalist vision
of a
church
at odds with modernity.
But the smart
money,
is on
Dionigi Tettamanzi.
posted by felix betachat
at 8:44 AM - 228 comments
March 31, 2005
March 30, 2005
one of the most exquisite and influential poets of our era, died this morning at age 78. I'd link to a story, but it's not in the news yet. This is a note from one of Robert's friends: "American poet Robert Creeley passed away this morning at 6:15 am in Odessa, Texas, where he was fulfilling a Residency at the Lannan Foundation. (Mr. Creeley was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.) His wife of twenty-eight years, Penelope, and son Will and daughter Hannah were at his side. The cause of death was complications from respiratory disease." Though a
comrade and muse for Beat Generation writers like
Allen Ginsberg and
Jack Kerouac, Creeley was much less well-known, and had a style rather unlike theirs, distinguished by extreme economy of words and an understated approach toward emotion. Creeley was often cited as a pioneer by the so-called
language poets, and his most creatively generative friendship was with another poet's poet, the late
Charles Olson. Creeley's subtlety and balance will be missed.
posted by digaman
at 9:17 AM - 38 comments
March 29, 2005
Anarchist web portals
Infoshop.org and
flag.blackened.net are under investigation by the FBI. While site operators are under gag order and cannot discuss the specifics of the situation that prompted this action, they confirm that logged IPs have been handed over under threat of arrest and seizure. This is eerily
familiar. Just how slippery has this particular slope become?
posted by Embryo
at 9:39 PM - 70 comments
"Cochran died at his home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles of an inoperable brain tumor, according to his brother-in-law Bill Baker. His wife and his two sisters were with him at the time of his death.
"Cochran, his family and colleagues were secretive about his illness to protect the attorney's privacy as well as the network of Cochran law offices that largely draw their cachet from his presence. But Cochran confirmed in a Sept. 2004 interview with The Times that he was being treated by the eminent neurosurgeon Keith Black at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles."
posted by allaboutgeorge
at 3:27 PM - 91 comments
March 28, 2005
March 27, 2005
March 24, 2005
(so NSFW it isn't funny at all, most links are not safe either)
'The animal kingdom would probably cease to exist without
smegma.' - Thomas Ritter, MD.
Smegma's a widely misunderstood substance, rather than being a noxious waste product it moisturizes the glans and keeps it smooth, soft, and supple. Its antibacterial and antiviral properties keep the penis clean and healthy though a build up can result in
balanitis. Here's an article on
how to collect it for experimentation as an extracted bacterium from smegma has been successfully used to treat
bladder cancer as well as a strange experiment on the potential
carcinogenic effects of smegma on mice (hint, there were none found, if anything, the smegma'ed mice outlived the control mice). Smegma is also related to
vernix, the cheese-like substance on a newborn's skin.
Lots of
humor to
be had, including the
Devil's Dictionary definition as well as a band called, yeah,
Smegma and even a cocktail recipe for something called a
Smegma Delight (vodka, bourbon and parmesan cheese, umm, pass).
posted by fenriq
at 4:35 PM - 48 comments
"I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated." -James Nachtwey-
(First post, I don't know if this is a re-post, if so--sorry!)
posted by countzen
at 11:24 AM - 30 comments
March 21, 2005
March 18, 2005
The Queen's composer wonders whether he should rethink his thrifty attitude towards accidentally acquired food.
posted by maudlin
at 6:43 PM - 28 comments
March 14, 2005
March 13, 2005
March 11, 2005
Well, for a fact or two,
The Beirut Wall Isn't Falling,
Lebanon is not Ukraine and
it is not democracy that's on the march in the Middle East. And while
remembering all those arguments made 1,500 deaths ago--not to mention
those so far uncounted but estimated at 100,000+ civilian deaths--let it be, all the while the
Iraq War compels Pentagon to rethink Big-Picture Strategy, it is that American military intevention which makes
America as a Revolutionary Force in the Middle East, according to some. Meanwhile,
Kishore Mahbubani, author of
Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World lists
Five Strategic Mistakes the West has made which continue to destabilize the Islamic world. Along related lines, comes
The Origins of
al Qaeda.s Ideology: Implications for US Strategy.
Sound bites, wishful thoughts and stage managed demonstrations aside, could it be something more thoughtful might be required? Say, like,
Understanding Islamism ? (Now available in new slow acting convenient Word or pdf form) Say,
Which War Is This Anyway ?
posted by y2karl
at 1:41 PM - 54 comments
March 7, 2005
March 6, 2005
For years the voice of BBC Radio 1's 'The Friday Rock Show' and, for TV viewers throughout the UK, the voice of a multitude of adverts,
Tommy Vance has died following a stroke. RIP you gravel-throated bringer of rock.
posted by TheDonF
at 6:26 AM - 9 comments
March 4, 2005
March 1, 2005
February 28, 2005
"When it comes to prostate cancer, there's more than meets the eye," National Prostate Cancer Coalition CEO Richard N. Atkins, M.D. said. "Often times when one has symptoms for prostate cancer it's already in its late stages, that.s why early detection is so important."
posted by oissubke
at 10:18 AM - 29 comments
February 27, 2005
February 26, 2005
founder of
Amnesty International has passed away. It all started with
a letter and grew into one of the most influential human rights organization in the world. Here is a
video tribute from Amnesty International (real player only, I'm afraid, though there is a transcript)
posted by Kattullus
at 8:55 PM - 13 comments
February 23, 2005
Just as
Thievery Corporation's The Cosmic Game hits shelves, it's announced that acclaimed jazz vocalist
Pam Bricker, long-time Thievery conspirator--and probably the best guest vocalist the D.C. duo has ever had--has
passed.
Chung's blog post mentions, "it was most likely suicide." Are there any MeFi'ers out there who can provide more information? Confirm? Disconfirm?
posted by Mikey-San
at 8:35 PM - 18 comments
February 20, 2005
February 19, 2005
February 17, 2005
Supertramp. From the trademark album "Breakfast in America": the saxophone was recorded with a STC 4038 in the bell and a U87 a couple of feet away for an overall sound. Here are the
lyrics. Use this to sing along with
(Midi File). Download the tune onto your cellphone here
(Mp3).The famous Wurlitzer Piano opener
(Mp3). My earworm work for the day is done, muahahahah
posted by jeremias
at 4:49 AM - 29 comments
February 16, 2005
Hunter S. Thompson has an idea for Bill Murray. I'm not sure it would check out with the NRA's
Gun Safety Rules, though.
Other people have been
creative when it comes to shooting things with shotguns. The combination of
shotguns and
golf has even been done before, although in a very different way.
Fire at will!
posted by PhatLobley
at 12:51 PM - 16 comments
February 11, 2005
A Nebraska man upset that his absentee ballot wasn't counted has attempted to rally support for his cause by contacting local new agencies. When that failed... post it on ebay.
posted by dirtylittlemonkey
at 12:55 PM - 3 comments
February 9, 2005
February 7, 2005
February 3, 2005
February 2, 2005
January 31, 2005
Sociologists graphed the romantic and sexual relationships of 80% of an entire high school (832 out of ~1000 students). The research indicates that high schoolers lack sexual alpha-persons resulting in partner maps that are mostly long lines rather than the more hub and spoke like maps common in adult maps.
posted by Mitheral
at 12:14 AM - 47 comments
January 29, 2005
legendary rock & roll drummer and Hall of Fame inductee, died Friday at the age of 60 after a brief fight with stomach cancer.
posted by geeknik
at 12:12 PM - 8 comments
January 27, 2005
The BBC's Ivan Noble has been keeping an online diary of his fight against a malignant brain tumour. Alas, his illness is now getting the better of him, and this will be his final column.
He has been, at times, an inspiration, incredibly brave and totally honest about his illness. As a former colleague, he shall also be remembered fondly.
Start from
the beginning, it's a must read.
posted by scaryduck
at 2:56 AM - 10 comments
January 26, 2005
is an online documentary from the Library of Congress with "nearly 170 audio and video interviews, totaling 40 hours, with photos, drawings, written narratives and poems." (
About the collection.)
[via Salon]
posted by kirkaracha
at 4:01 PM - 16 comments
January 23, 2005
January 21, 2005
January 19, 2005
January 18, 2005
is just about the best thing I've seen in a while. (warning: haunting image ahead)
posted by mathowie
at 3:23 PM - 83 comments
January 14, 2005
Drummer Spencer Dryden of Airplane dies. Dryden recorded on a number of the Airplane's most famous albums, "Surrealistic Pillow"; "After Bathing At Baxter's"; the live "Bless Its Pointed Little Head"; "Crown Of Creation"; and "Volunteers."
Read the
CNN article.
posted by turtlegirl
at 9:37 AM - 10 comments
January 13, 2005
Although it's typically my policy not to reveal the identity of people I know in Iraq, I am making an exception in this case. The journal above belongs to Michael Smith, a LiveJournal friend of mine who
died in Iraq on Tuesday when an RPG hit his Humvee.
Mike was 24 years old and leaves behind family, friends, and a newlywed wife, who he married in Korea shortly before he deployed to Iraq. As is tradition on LiveJournal,
his last journal entry has become a memorial of sorts.
posted by insomnia_lj
at 9:36 AM - 75 comments
January 12, 2005
January 9, 2005
January 8, 2005
While on an early morning walk last month, a newspaper reporter happened upon the body of Lucy the goose, who, up until then, had been holding court on the
town's waterfront for more than ten years. Kind of a touching story, from a tiny town in Maryland.
posted by emelenjr
at 9:30 PM - 26 comments
January 7, 2005
and they highlight even more (if that's possible) the power of the sea. Saomeone has geo-aligned the various before and after aerial and satellite photos and adjusted the scale to provide a very accurate then/now comparison.
posted by mmahaffie
at 12:53 PM - 41 comments
January 4, 2005
The father of the modern Graphic Novel and hugely influential comics figure has died today from heart surgery complications. His concept of
Sequential Art helped move comics out of the idea of being solely "kid's stuff" and was seen as a cannon in the comic art world.
He was working on a book called "The Plot" due out later this year. He will be missed. More info and Eisner Bio at
Newsarama
posted by Jeffy
at 7:23 AM - 54 comments
January 3, 2005
December 31, 2004
December 29, 2004
: Or Better Referred To As The Politician's Bible
by Arthur Schopenhauer.
posted by Gyan
at 9:43 PM - 20 comments
December 28, 2004
December 26, 2004
A massive earthquake - the largest since 1964 - centred off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra has caused tidal waves that are devastating coastal areas around the Indian Ocean including
Sri Lanka, India and
Indonesia.
Eyewitness report from the south coast of Sri Lanka.
The death tolls are still rising, there is the risk of further tsunamis and it is being estimated that 100,000s of people will be left homeless.
posted by i_cola
at 1:43 AM - 193 comments
December 20, 2004
December 19, 2004
Greetings everybody,
As you have probably noticed, we have often had downtimes. This was because it was so hard to keep this site up! But now we are sorry to inform you all, that SuprNova is closing down for good in the way that we all know it.
Apparently something went down last night that prompted this exit from the scene, a great loss indeed as suprnova was the
gold standard for bittorrent sites. From the inside I have also learned work on
exeem is being halted (any beta testers can verify?) trying to head off problems previously
seen here.
posted by gren
at 8:45 AM - 146 comments
December 15, 2004
December 13, 2004
Q and A with Lydiard
here. Obit via Boomberg
here. NYTimes obit
here. Lydiard had been travelling through the US on a final lecture tour. Among distance runners Lydiard is a hero. Two of his athletes won gold medals for New Zealand at the 1960 Olympics, and
Peter Snell went on to dominate the middle distance running at the 1964 Games, taking home two gold medals, the only man since 1920 to win both the 800m and the 1500m. Lydiard coached Mexican, Japanese and Finnish runners to Gold medal performances, and his philosophy of training has influenced countless other runners. Finland thought that he was important enough to the success of their runner's to award him the White Cross (eq. of a knighthood), making him the only non-Finn to be given the award. Lydiard's approach was high-mileage, aerobic conditioning. Even his middle distance runners trained 100 miles/week. He felt that too many athletes were training for speed first and endurance second. One of his lectures, explaining some of the science behind his theories, is
here.
posted by OmieWise
at 6:12 AM - 10 comments
December 12, 2004
December 10, 2004
December 9, 2004
-- Boston-area political commentator,
film critic, and
memoirist -- is close to death. After a debilitating illness ten years ago, Brudnoy has given a public face to
living with AIDS, and has used his renown to found an organization for AIDS research. Last night, his final interview served as a public wake for his friends, his loyal listeners, and local government officials who sparred with him on his show.
posted by pxe2000
at 4:21 AM - 9 comments
December 6, 2004
Tired of those pesky evolutionists getting all the natural history museums? Want to see dinosaurs
threatening Adam or
entering the ark? Then hie yourself to Petersburg, Kentucky, where what is billing itself as "the world's most unusual museum" will soon be opening its doors.
"Uneasy answering questions about radiocarbon dating? Rock layers? Natural selection? Do you want to believe in six literal days, but you.re still confused about the big bang or Grand Canyon? You.ll find answers here!"
Some
background on founder Ken Ham and his theory that dinosaurs are "missionary lizards" who draw young minds to evolution and must be reclaimed.
posted by CunningLinguist
at 5:02 PM - 60 comments
December 5, 2004
December 3, 2004
is a response to my perception of current design trends.
In many popular sites that I come across I sense coldness;
an attempt to master nature,
to remove us from reality,
a struggle to feel superior to our offline world and to one another. ...
We are of this earth and though our online world is virtual,
I believe that the most fulfilling user experiences will be so because the designer/artist wisely incorporated elements from our natural environment into their presentation.
They made an effort to communicate with our humanity rather [than] squash it into cold vector perfection.
In addition to speaking with the mind,
they bonded with the soul.
Yes, we are still left bodiless,
but hopefully,
when we get up from the computer and finally agree to go to bed,
we take with us an enriched soul,
rather than a depleted one.
-
Kurt Dommermuth, 10 April 2001
posted by jefgodesky
at 6:51 AM - 61 comments
November 22, 2004
Melcher, one of the creators of the 1960's Los Angeles sound
produced the
Byrds hits "Turn Turn Turn" and "Mr Tamberine Man" and he also
played on the Beach Boys seminal album
"Pet Sounds." At one time, Melcher also owned
this house and, for a while, he believed that the murders that occurred there
might have been in retribution for not signing
this guy to a record contract.
posted by thedailygrowl
at 11:05 PM - 25 comments
November 21, 2004
This is for you if you've ever wondered what it would be like to have sex with a
dolphin, a
grizzly bear or even a
lion. All anatomically correct - and mostly a little bit frightening.
The site is
NSFW - unless you are a dildo maker...
posted by mattr
at 7:34 AM - 52 comments
November 18, 2004
It's been a long time since I've been to a site that rendered me (almost) speechless.
posted by adampsyche
at 2:36 PM - 129 comments
November 16, 2004
Heavy computer users risk glaucoma - Toho University study.
posted by soyjoy
at 1:58 PM - 21 comments
November 15, 2004
Jhonn Balance (of Coil, and many other projects)
posted by qDot
at 10:38 AM - 19 comments
November 13, 2004
November 11, 2004
November 5, 2004
Ever wonder how the world is going to hell in a handbasket if gay marriage runs amok? Our own
digaman recounts
his ceremony from a couple years ago, after being together with someone for ten years. Sounds like every other wedding I've ever been to (except for the lack of bridesmaids). I'm always telling family members that don't have gay friends like I do: don't fear them, I assure you they're just as boring as you and I.
posted by mathowie
at 5:14 PM - 218 comments
November 3, 2004
President Bush won a second term from a divided and anxious nation, his promise of steady, strong wartime leadership trumping John Kerry's fresh-start approach to Iraq and joblessness. After a long, tense night of vote counting, the Democrat called Bush to concede Ohio and the presidency, The Associated Press learned.
posted by Outlawyr
at 8:22 AM - 504 comments
November 2, 2004
: lots of variables in play, and these numbers do not include early voting. Further, early exit polling has in the past tended to favor Republicans. This election, though, that trend may no longer hold. We'll see. Get out and vote! Vote vote vote! (more inside).
posted by troutfishing
at 11:44 AM - 538 comments
October 30, 2004
- Bush Adm. sues to give Ashcroft authority over voting disputes under the HAVA Act.
"...Bush administration lawyers argued....that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act.....would reverse decades of precedent..... Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, individuals have gone to federal court to enforce their right to vote.....in legal briefs filed in connection with cases in Ohio, Michigan and Florida, the administration's lawyers argue that the new law gives Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft the exclusive power to bring lawsuits to enforce its provisions." I'm reminded of Andrew Card's September 1, 2004 comment
"that President Bush views America as a ''10-year-old child" in need of the sort of protection provided by a parent."
posted by troutfishing
at 10:30 AM - 29 comments
October 26, 2004
Peel's contribution to modern music and culture was "immeasurable".
posted by dash_slot-
at 6:07 AM - 118 comments
October 20, 2004
Reuters had a camera crew on hand to see people digging a man, a woman, and four children out of a house in Falluja, and have
video footage of this up on their site. The US military denies this ever happened, and have released a statement saying that "intelligence sources indicate a known Zarqawi propagandist is passing false reports to the media."
Incredible...
posted by insomnia_lj
at 3:51 PM - 34 comments
October 10, 2004
where did you go, now that the lights have gone low...
posted by qDot
at 10:45 PM - 111 comments
October 9, 2004
October 6, 2004
October 5, 2004
September 19, 2004
September 11, 2004
August 29, 2004
Singer Laura Branigan dead of a brain anuerysm. Conspiracy theorists note - actress
Sunny Johnson, who ice-skated to "Gloria" in the film
Flashdance, died of the same ailment in 1984.
posted by Oriole Adams
at 12:33 AM - 16 comments
August 12, 2004
August 4, 2004
Reminds me somewhat of the drawings of Drew and Natalie Dee.
posted by VanRoosta
at 1:21 PM - 34 comments
August 2, 2004
August 1, 2004
I've occasionally checked in with 17 y.o. Markelle's blog for a year or two now. While I don't know her personally, I'd consider it unlikely that she's making this up. I'd guess it's more likely that her dad actually did commit suicide. "Best of the web?" Honestly, I don't know. Perhaps it's just a glimpse at a life that might benefit from your good thoughts.
posted by scarabic
at 11:53 PM - 56 comments
July 23, 2004
July 14, 2004
is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by karmaville
at 12:00 AM - 80 comments
July 7, 2004
July 2, 2004
June 23, 2004
A
gala meeting at a Senate office building invited 100 "honorees" were invited to receive "International Crowns of Peace", only to watch the Reverend Sun Yung Moon of the
Unification Church claim the awards for himself. Amidst finger-pointing and denials, a video depicting Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) coronating Rev. Moon, was removed from a Unification Church website. But a number of
bit torrent mirrors of that March 23rd "promotional film" have been popping up....while the
February 4th video of
a nearly identical Capitol gathering has squeaked by without news exposure or outrage.
posted by Smart Dalek
at 5:48 AM - 40 comments
June 22, 2004
After 14 years of highly successful nationwide tours that began the trend of the multi-stage, summer super rock fest,
Lollapalooza 2004 has been cancelled due to low ticket sales. I went to a 1991 show, and attended half a dozen other similar fests in the past ten years, but as I've gotten older I've become a bigger fan of the intimate club vs. the gigantic rock festival. Still, Lollapalooza being cancelled comes as a shock, especially considering the stellar line-up on both stages.
posted by mathowie
at 9:15 AM - 66 comments
June 21, 2004
June 10, 2004
Very sad to hear. My favorite was always "Georgia on My Mind". What was yours? Any personal memories you associate with his music?
posted by jmevius
at 12:46 PM - 69 comments
June 7, 2004
(WARNING! Windows Media file,
very very not safe for work.) "The Aristocrats" is a long-lived comedians' in-joke--or, rather, an extraordinarily filthy joke that's not really a joke. (Gilbert Gottfried
knocked 'em dead with it shortly after 9/11.) Now it's going public (sort of):
Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza are making a
movie featuring over 100 comedians telling their own versions. The
South Park version linked above is "not even in the top 5 for dirtiest." Yikes!
posted by 88robots
at 10:52 PM - 54 comments
June 4, 2004
Torture and Truth and
The Logic of Torture--Mark Danner writes about
Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade (The Taguba Report) and
Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation in the former and concludes thusly in the latter:
Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded in Abu Ghraib, and the multiple tangled plotlines that will be teased out in the coming weeks and months about responsibility, knowledge, and culpability, lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in Washington: that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the United States, at various locations around the world, from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo in Cuba to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have been torturing prisoners. (More Within)
posted by y2karl
at 12:49 PM - 16 comments
May 24, 2004
describes how the first solider to be court-martialed for Abu Ghraib is greeted as a hero, while the soldier who brought these activites to light is treated as a villain.
posted by FormlessOne
at 9:00 AM - 71 comments
May 18, 2004
Tonight (or tomorrow night, ymmv) marks the 2nd Annual
Ride of Silence, a solemn testament to those that have been injured or killed while biking on the roads. Begun last year in Dallas in tribute to local ultramarathoner
Larry Schwartz, it began as a one-time tribute. Apparently, there was enough National interest to make this an annual event, and this year
more than 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada are participating.
posted by Ufez Jones
at 10:09 PM - 19 comments
May 12, 2004
May 11, 2004
May 2, 2004
is one of the more moving interviews I have ever heard and was certainly a highlight of the weekend. She is a beautifully calm person with seemingly the right approach to an awfully violent world.
posted by specialk420
at 8:39 PM - 3 comments
April 28, 2004
But he always came back, smiling that beautiful smile of his, and those blue eyes of his... This time he will not be back. My saints have always come from hell, and now, with his passing, there are no more saints".
Selby is the author of
Last Exit to Brooklyn, (
tried for obscenity in England and supported by, among many others, Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess),
Requiem For a Dream,
Song of the Silent Snow. He is being
eulogized in the USA and UK, but also, massively (I've just watched a fantastic TV special) in France, where he is much more popular than in his native land (Selby's death was the cover story -- plus pages 2, 3 and 4 -- in the daily Libération today --
.pdf file):
Dernière sortie vers la rédemption,
L'extase de la dévastation. What makes all this kind of ironic -- in a very Selbyesque way -- is that Selby himself used to say,
"I started to die 36 hours before I was born..." (more inside)
posted by matteo
at 5:21 PM - 16 comments
Along with
Philip Larkin and
Ted Hughes, Gunn became famous as a
young poet in England in the 1950s as part of "The Movement," writing
fine poems in rhyme and meter. But then he fell in love with an American soldier, Mike Kitay, and followed him to San Francisco, where he crafted one of the most daringly original voices in the 20th century, handling taboo subjects like LSD, orgiastic sex, and his
50-year relationship with Kitay with the precision of a diamond cutter. Gunn lived in my neighborhood, and was a dapper, subtle, sexy and hilariously witty man until the end. Ten years ago, when I asked him what music he was listening to he replied, "Oh, Nirvana and Social Distortion. I'm a flighty teenager that way."
posted by digaman
at 11:22 AM - 24 comments
April 23, 2004
, who walked away from a $3.6 million contract in the aftermath of 9/11 to join his brother in the Special Forces, dies in Afganistan. Unselfishness personified.
posted by treywhit
at 9:12 AM - 46 comments
April 13, 2004
March 18, 2004
is caused by a fungus-like organism called Phytophthora ramorum
and it has been discovered at Monrovia and other nurseries in California.
Georgia officials have banned all sales of plants from California for the time being. SOD is frequently compared to Chestnut Blight, which killed 3.5 billion trees in about fifty years and almost wiped out the entire species. There is a different mating type of the microbe in Europe and it is believed that if the two were to come together this could potentially result in a much more devastating form of SOD.
posted by bargle
at 9:58 AM - 7 comments
March 16, 2004
Bob was a Public Affairs officer with the CPA in Iraq and a pretty good blogger. After spending 6 months in Iraq as a Marine he returned as a civilian to do what he could to help the Iraqi people rebuild their nation. His blog posts were sometimes funny, sometimes sad but always told from the point of view of someone who wanted nothing more than to help. Link goes to the last post before his death.
posted by billman
at 2:55 PM - 30 comments
March 11, 2004
Here's a dainty can of pastel worms: The Democracy Now! show on Pacifica Radio is asking this question:
"Was Martha Stewart Targeted Because She is a Major Democratic Contributor and a Woman? Where is Ken Lay?"
Article
here, or watch the stream for
low or
high bandwidth.
Is it still a good thing?
posted by moonbird
at 1:02 PM - 17 comments
A string of deadly blasts has hit three Madrid train stations during the rush hour with latest reports speaking of at least 131 people killed.
posted by Brilliantcrank
at 4:13 AM - 96 comments
March 10, 2004
March 8, 2004
March 3, 2004
joins other cities in offering gay marriages. Multnomah County didn't consult the state Attorney General before they started issuing licenses, though, which is a bit unusual. Forgiveness easier than permission? There's also a Unitarian Church in downtown Portland that is performing same-sex marriage ceremonies, if you're interested in a church wedding.
posted by SpecialK
at 12:18 PM - 73 comments
February 29, 2004
February 20, 2004
longtime editor of the
Weekly World News, creator of Ed Anger, Bat Boy and other semi-real totems of society's fuzzy underbelly, is dead at 56.
The fact that I had to find this out in
The Economist, of all places, makes me madder than -- than -- than George S. Patton at a Peace Rally.
posted by chicobangs
at 8:02 AM - 26 comments
February 6, 2004
What else will 99¢ get you from the iTunes Music Store? Nothin', that's what.
posted by marzenie99
at 10:59 AM - 30 comments
January 23, 2004
January 13, 2004
November 29, 2003
"Her name, like most of her life, is forgotten, but her one defining moment is carved into memory: She is the girl who played dead. That moment came in a South Dallas crack house, where she'd been hanging out with four other teen-agers 'in the game,' dabbling in the margins of the drug trade. Her survival was the closest thing to a miracle at a time when it seemed like we were witnessing a final surge into apocalyptic violence on the streets of Dallas."
posted by item
at 2:52 PM - 23 comments
November 26, 2003
says Bush while signing a new defense bill that includes millions of dollars for a small nuclear bomb designed to destroy deep, hardened underground bunkers. The legislation repeals a decade-old ban on research into low-yield nuclear weapons.
posted by Espoo2
at 3:17 PM - 35 comments
November 15, 2003
November 11, 2003
...dead @ 85. My favorite Ed Norton quote: "One hand washes the other... And both hands wash the face."
posted by thrakintosh
at 2:33 PM - 16 comments
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 may have brought an end to the Great War, but the ending was merely the beginning of the aftermath.
The aftermath years were a time of paradox, where the men who returned from the horrors of the trenches wanted to forget, and where those who had stayed behind, and had lost husbands and brothers, and sons and fathers were equally determined never to forget. It was a time where remembrance of the dead became a way of life, and where it was somehow assumed that all the best, and the finest young men of a generation had died. The other side of that assumption was that those who had survived were somehow less than those who had died. . . The exploration of that time, that world, is the theme of these pages.
posted by ewagoner
at 8:00 AM - 11 comments
October 21, 2003
is confirmed to have committed suicide this evening at the age of 34.
posted by dayan
at 11:01 PM - 83 comments
October 7, 2003
September 29, 2003
September 15, 2003
September 14, 2003
September 12, 2003
September 11, 2003
-
In Stairwell B of the North Tower, 16 people lived amid the avalanche of concrete and steel. But surviving was only the start of their struggle.
Everyone handles things differently. Some want to move on, others need to remember. Some thought that to commemorate 9/11, it might be appropriate to have a dedicated thread that would be a repository of links and comments. Miguel started such a thread for
9/11/2002. And for those who may not have read it, here is
the Mefi 9/11/2001 thread.
posted by madamjujujive
at 12:04 AM - 49 comments
September 8, 2003
Born January 23, 1947. Died September 7, 2003. Now I guess he can get some sleep.
posted by alms
at 6:49 AM - 33 comments
August 8, 2003
Did he who made the lamb make
thee?
O. vulgaris, now appearing on a sea floor near you.
posted by Hildago
at 9:50 PM - 12 comments
August 5, 2003
August 3, 2003
July 22, 2003
Senior editor of influential cyberculture magazine
Mondo 2000 (the magazine that arguably
inspired Wired) and the original grrl-hacker, dead at age
unknown. She coined the term "cypherpunk," wrote
interesting books, and encouraged every girl to
get online.
posted by waxpancake
at 11:23 AM - 14 comments
July 4, 2003
June 29, 2003
May 16, 2003
April 24, 2003
Student kills principal, self at school. "A heavily armed 14-year-old boy shot and killed his school principal inside a crowded junior high cafeteria Thursday morning, then killed himself, authorities said. " I'm finding nothing else about this other than the AP story. I'm curious what they mean by "heavily armed."
posted by archimago
at 1:02 PM - 42 comments
April 21, 2003
April 16, 2003
April 14, 2003
Even though I saw some discussion on MeFi on the Iraqi Museum, this link really brought it home. Forgetting the political BS, it's just a tragedy.
posted by zebra_monkey
at 4:06 PM - 46 comments
April 12, 2003
The
National Museum of Iraq recorded a history of civilizations that began to flourish in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than 7,000 years ago. But once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein's government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.
posted by the fire you left me
at 5:26 PM - 58 comments
April 4, 2003
March 21, 2003
March 19, 2003
March 10, 2003
Britain's most popular motorcycle racer has died of cancer. His exuberance and lust for life were truly inspirational. He'll be missed.
posted by Nick Jordan
at 12:31 AM - 16 comments
March 4, 2003
gentle ribbing, vicious attack, cautionary tale, or dead-on satire? And just how quickly can we get this thread to devolve into a parody of itself?
posted by GreyWingnut
at 7:16 AM - 76 comments
March 1, 2003
February 27, 2003
Fred Rogers of "Mister Roger's Neighborhood" died of stomach cancer at age 74. To be honest, his was never my personal favorite PBS kid's show growing up (I preferred off-brand shows like "Zoom" and "3-2-1 Contact"). But my appreciation for him when I was an adult was pretty high. Anyway, it's a sad day in the neighborhood.
posted by jscalzi
at 2:17 AM - 130 comments
February 26, 2003
is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their heads wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by Stan Chin
at 5:28 PM - 71 comments
February 15, 2003
February 4, 2003
There is a conspiracy theory that has been making the rounds on the net for quite
some time now. In it, the actor
Elijah Wood (Frodo) and
Dominic Monaghan (Merry)
are a gay couple that have been together since the filming of The Lord of the Rings.
And they want to come out...but contracts and a whole lot of money at stake are keeping
them in. So what do they do? Start testing the waters by infiltrating a gay gossip site
called
Data Lounge. Test the waters. Get media attention brought to them so they can out
themselves as smoothly as possible and not get in trouble. Going on for some time now,
the saga is up to
thread 14 and shows no sign of slowing down. There are cryptic posts,
shoutouts through clothing,
PR beardings,
interviews, sheep,
photographs, insiders and trolls. And
the strangest thing of all is that some of the proof is strangely compelling. Examples of all this
and the "proofs" can be found
here.
So after looking at many of the "facts", do you think it possible that two young actors might be
trying to test the waters to come out in a novel fashion? And more importantly this all raises
the question; do you think mainstream America (and the world in general) is ready to accept
young openly gay men in cinema as leading men? Or is it career suicide?
posted by Windigo
at 12:15 AM - 54 comments
February 1, 2003
At 9:00am EST communication was lost with space shuttle Columbia. The touch down should have been occurred at 9:16am.
posted by MzB
at 6:23 AM - 450 comments
November 10, 2002
October 23, 2002
October 2, 2002
(which you can now
buy) was originally posted a while back, but many more additions have been made to this brilliant strip since then (by the same guy who gave us this
series)
posted by adamms222
at 5:19 AM - 179 comments
September 9, 2002
"You can't sustain an empire from a debtor's weakening position--sooner or later the creditors pull the plug. That humiliating lesson was learned by Great Britain early in the last century, and the United States faces a similar reckoning ahead."
posted by homunculus
at 11:44 AM - 39 comments
September 4, 2002
November 14, 2001
I've been seeing the video for Ryan Adams' "New York, New York" late at night on VH1. At a time when television censors are editing out images of the World Trade Center and words like "hijack" out of old movies, it is a welcome surprise. The video, filmed on Sept. 7th, has a pre-attack NY skyline with the WTC prominently featured. It's the best tribute to NY I've seen in the last couple of months.
posted by eyeballkid
at 10:01 AM - 20 comments
October 31, 2001
October 29, 2001
- A
European Community Weblog. (found via
prolific's
weblog.) Get in on the ground floor of this exciting opportunity before it
IPO's MetaFilter's gets too many users!
posted by msacheson
at 1:08 PM - 19 comments
September 8, 2001
May 15, 2001
July 14, 1999
is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by mathowie
at 3:03 PM - 115 comments
