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January 31
"Because in the end..."
One of the most insightful, engaging, and well written sites (not to mention the one that got plenty of us blogging in the first place) stops updating, at least for the near future; the tear-jerker of a last entry touches on so many things- relationships, art, emotions, careers, etc - it perfectly encapsulates so much of what made the page great. We'll miss you, Jack Saturn.
That being said, I can't wait for the book.
posted by NickBarat at 5:39 PM PST - 7 comments
Splat!
It has all the usual stuff like yourname@spl.at e-mail etc...
BUT you should check out this link...
'Help The Girl'
It's a weekly serial where you can vote to control the characters...
posted by jonpanky at 2:50 PM PST - 5 comments
Libyan gets minimum of 20 years for Lockerbie Bombing by Scottish Court.
Why are British courts handing out such tiny sentences? After all, in America it's not uncommon for people to receive 99 years for a single murder. Some people are doing over 10 years for rape alone. This Libyan could have easily received the death sentence if he were in the US, as it was similar in scale to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Yet, in the UK, it's possible to kill people through negligence, and get away with it. Just last month an uninsured driver was speeding, killed a pedestrian, fled the scene, and although found guilty, only received a
driving ban!
Is the UK overly soft in its sentencing? Or is the USA overly draconian?
posted by wackybrit at 10:20 AM PST - 23 comments
Sega bails
on another piece of hardware. It looks like the dreamcast is dead. They are stopping production and reducing the price to clear the dreamcasts they have remaining in stock.
posted by bytecode at 9:01 AM PST - 20 comments
Feeling Safe about the Keeper of Domain Names
Anyone notice that at least at 10:30am EST that Network Solutions homepage brings up an Error page? Doesn't that make us all feel safe.
And then there was the Registrars.com registrar transfer form which didn't think the domain I was trying to transfer had been registered (but if you used their WHOIS it showed it was).
posted by matte at 7:39 AM PST - 18 comments
Had this idea
about a year ago over beer, when netthings were a-cookin', fleshed it out with some geek-comrades, pitched it under an NDA to a VC, got the green light, and then chickened out and went back to the day job. Once you really thought it through and calculated the wired populace as a percentage of the unwired, we figured, the idea was fabulous, a service to The People
and a MoneyMaker. Now
someone else seems to have had the same idea, more or less. I wish them luck. If it takes off, I'm gonna feel mighty dumb, and if it tanks, mighty lucky.
Now I can finally ask the MeFi jury...Silly thing or smart?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:34 AM PST - 17 comments
Salon tightens its belt...
No surprise there, things are tough all over. But what caught my eye was a quote in paragraph 5 from an industry pundit who said he "hasn't seen any site that can be profitable with a revenue base of less than $15 million per quarter". What future does the web have if every site that creates its own content has to bill $60 million a year?
posted by BGM at 1:19 AM PST - 12 comments
The first chapter
of Eric Schlosser's new book piqued my interest;
this
and
this solidified my desire to read Fast Food Nation. Has anyone else read the book yet? Comments?
posted by JDC8 at 12:07 AM PST - 11 comments
January 30
CNN portalizes?
Not exactly, but the portal is clearly the model for their new design, which resembles nothing so much as a tall Yahoo. Headlines, except for the top story, are smaller and scattered about the page in more than one category -- something they've done for some time, but now with magnified effect (I counted
six links to Lockerbie stories). Have they forgotten that their mission is delivering
news?
posted by dhartung at 11:00 PM PST - 8 comments
k10k hits 100!
Can't let today end without a little applause for k10k's 100th issue. And it's a doozy. (Be sure to check out all the random splashes.)
posted by fraying at 8:06 PM PST - 8 comments
Censorware.org
one of the best censorware pages, has died. "Due to demands from some of the people who contributed, in however minor a fashion, to this site, it has been taken down." Dagnabit! Anybody have any idea why? The site had one of the neatest pages on the net, estimated how fast it was going to show how impossible it was to keep up. Free spxxch loses an important defender.
posted by mrmorgan at 8:31 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
Disney will finally shut down Go.com
Guess I wasn't the only one to think Go was a bad idea. Ever since Disney started doing the Go thing, their Disney.com site went from useful to down-right nasty. They might as well have called it goaway.com. I just hope what they mean by streamlining is take away the crap and make this stuff useful. The move was praised by Wall Street analysts. "Good riddance"
posted by jdiaz at 6:56 AM PST - 7 comments
While
IjustGotFired.com seems to be in full-swing, handing out free @ijustgotfired email addresses to the many people who are finding themselves being cut in the world of lay-offs, the site's founder, Wrybread, of
WryBread.com fame (a great site to waste enormous blocks of time at, looking at fun-but-useless mayhem type of stuff), has been unusually quiet with his own site since November.
Anybody in the S.F. area know anything about this? He didn't walk perilously close to the edge of the Earth and fall off, did he?
posted by lizardboy at 5:49 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment
The Bush voucher plan
A British opinion on the Bush education voucher plan. Is it too bold or too timid? We have read pros and cons on vouchers but this tackles the issue from a different slant.
posted by Postroad at 5:04 AM PST - 12 comments
One of the best movie news and gossip web sites,
Roughcut.com, has just closed, a victim of the AOL Time Warner layoffs. Luckily, the single best thing about Roughcut, David Poland's daily column "The Hot Button," will live on via
Poland's personal site.
posted by aaron at 12:48 AM PST - 3 comments
I'm surprised that none of us thought to post this: January 28 was the
15th anniversary of the Challenger explosion. For most of us Generation Xers, that day was the ultimate "where were you?" event, a moment as defining to our generation as the JFK assassination was to Boomers. Or at least that's what the media wants us to believe. In any case, it affected most people very strongly, and threw a hell of a monkey wrench into the US space program that we're arguably still recovering from. Worse, the shuttle's almost guaranteed to blow up again at some point, due to design problems and the inherent risks of space flight. So where were you on that day? How did it affect you? Do you think the nation was permanently affected?
posted by aaron at 12:33 AM PST - 65 comments
January 29
Physics problem
A "Discovery" program for kids at MSN.com explores the physics of skydiving, specifically the trajectory of an object dropped from a moving plane. Problem is, their demonstration animation looks completely phucked. More inside...
posted by Tubes at 8:46 PM PST - 8 comments
Reed's Law
is about how, under certain conditions ("Group Forming Networks") the value created by a network, rather than being quadratic as predicted by Metcalfe's Law, becomes exponential. What's interesting is his discussion of the kind of networks he's talking about (chat rooms, eBay and
MetaFilter?) and what happens in them. Trouble is, I can't quite follow him! Can you?
posted by rodii at 5:18 PM PST - 1 comments
Government waste.
While the report had very
libertarian leanings, John Stossel's special on how royally inept our government is at accomplishing
anything is an indictment of the entrenched ways of doing things. There
must be some sort of crossroad where liberal social policies can meet with real accountability without bureaucracy.
posted by owillis at 3:48 PM PST - 21 comments
See? Y'all sent me off to TVTechnology, and I found something interesting... Remember a couple years ago -- The Day The Pagers Died? They died because Galaxy 4 fell over, which in turn was because its Satellite Control Processors broke.
Both of them.
4 other birds are down one processor; a total of 25 are in danger -- all built on the Hughes HM-601 satellite 'bus'. What is it we always say about genetic diversity being good? Wouldn't you hate to be the engineer on the hook for *this* 12 billion dollars?
posted by baylink at 1:31 PM PST - 7 comments
GOP measure
to allow for our govt to assassinate those deemed worthy of it. introduced by Bob Barr in Senate today. I assume they mean non-Americans?
posted by Postroad at 1:12 PM PST - 19 comments
IE 6.0 beta?
It looks like they leaked a copy (Win 2000 only). Many screenshots. More integration with MSN, sidebars (explorer bars), media player, etc.
posted by tremendo at 8:54 AM PST - 18 comments
Catcher in the Rye just turned 50
and J.D. Salinger is staying true to form by doing nothing to mark the occasion. Even his publishing company is saying very little about the anniversary. I don't think it's right to stay silent about perhaps the greatest American novel of all-time. I've loved this book ever since I first read it. Hail to Holden Caufield, and Kudos to Salinger for writing the book.
posted by Bag Man at 12:53 AM PST - 27 comments
January 28
There's been a lot of talk of late about signal-to-noise ratios here on MeFi (er, Ashcroft who?...). Generally, we think of noise as something that always degrades the quality of a signal. Sometimes, however, the opposite can be the case. Here's a neat
little demonstration of a non-linear system in which noise can be used to
amplify a signal that would otherwise be too be faint to detect any other way. It exploits a phenomenon known as
Stochastic Resonance.
posted by lagado at 7:50 PM PST - 25 comments
Quoth the Ravens,
nevermore. 34 - 7, and the Vince Lombardi trophy goes back to Baltimore. My favorite spots were...
posted by baylink at 7:07 PM PST - 35 comments
This is pretty damn cool:
your bookmarks, napsterized. A new app (windows only, sorry) to let you share your favorite sites with everyone and allow others to search for them. If they add a hotlist, ala napster, this could be one killer app.
posted by mathowie at 2:02 PM PST - 7 comments
When I Am King
seems to be the latest supercool discovery in online comics. This guy updates weekly, and he's got 18 episodes so far.
posted by David Gaddis at 12:20 AM PST - 37 comments
January 27
Like the rest of Europe, Germany is going through a histrionic BSE scare. So Germans switched to sausage and pork. And then they were told pork contains anabolic steroids. So they switched to venison. And then they were told it might have BSE too. So the Germans, who hate veggies, are starting to "starve."
And raid zoos for meat. Hey, where'd all this paté come from?
posted by aaron at 11:01 PM PST - 5 comments
24 hours to go. Am I the only one who can't wait for the new tribes to square off? Place your bets at
SurvivorDeadPool.
posted by Basta at 2:51 PM PST - 13 comments
DirecTV takes a stand
and VIA satellite, "
killed pirated pieces of hardware that had enabled viewers in the U.S. and abroad to see a broad range of programming, including premium channels and pay-per-view events that they had not paid for." I didn't even know these pieces of hardware existed, but there are
whole sites dedicated to satellite hacking which tell you
what to do now if you had one of these. I hope if you have one of these cards you didn't have a Super Bowl Party planned.
posted by Mark at 12:01 PM PST - 13 comments
Winamp 3.0a2
has been released to the general public. Beware it's Alpha 2 so some things aren't complete, such as the EQ, but it still has some nice new features such as the Thinger and the ability to layer and alpha blend skins.
posted by physics at 10:30 AM PST - 15 comments
IT
gets a domain. The interesting thing is now maybe less how world-changing
IT might be (most dreamers I know, at least, have gone from wide-eyed Bradburian dreaming to the expectation of disappointment to resigned cynicism by now), but how the commercial game will play itself out. I feel all dirty now.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:33 AM PST - 6 comments
January 26
"My Untold Story"
- What if we threw a presidential campaign and nobody came? Ralph explains how he tried to engage the press, and why it didn't work.
posted by fleener at 6:29 PM PST - 20 comments
U.S. sending Patriot missles to Israel
Iraq moves troops close to Syrian border and announces it is a military exercise. The U.S. moves Patriot missle outfit to Israel with some troops and announces it is a military exercise. My trainer told me that sometimes you can overdo the exercising.
posted by Postroad at 5:00 PM PST - 4 comments
So, who are you going to vote for?
Yes, it's that time again, as the 2004 presidential campaign gets underway!
The Des Moines Register asked registered Iowa Democrats to declare their favorites. Who are you supporting?
posted by aaron at 12:49 PM PST - 12 comments
:-(
Despair, INC. Secures official trademark registration for ":-(", announces plans to sue millions for trademark infringement.
posted by Hackworth at 11:55 AM PST - 13 comments
SurvivorBlog2 - Crazier than the first time around
Now, if only Yahoo would add this as a module for my start page.
For those who followed SurvivorBlog1, all the old contestants are back in the peanut gallery and there's a heap load of drama, cat fights, & smack talking going around for SB2. Sick, twisted, embarrassingly addictive.
posted by jujubee at 11:53 AM PST - 9 comments
Mostly BS.
In it, we learn the World Economic Forum wants to revamp its public relations, and that the next WTO Ministerial (previously in Seattle) will be held in Qatar. I read elsewhere the tiny nation doesn't have enough hotel rooms, so attendees will stay on luxury cruiseliners anchored in the harbor.
posted by capt.crackpipe at 10:32 AM PST - 6 comments
More than Missing Dubyas
Following up
yesterday's iffy Drudge link, a bit more conclusive (MSNBC) reporting of the so-called "pranks" that bitter Clinton & Gore staffers pulled before leaving their offices. (more inside)
posted by Dreama at 10:29 AM PST - 25 comments
yahoogroups conversion of egroups
is in full swing. I've been through the conversion from onelist to egroups, but now with this they're mandating a conversion to the Yahoo ID and killing off the old sign-in system - which was email address + password. Why *must* I have a Yahoo ID?
posted by artlung at 8:14 AM PST - 30 comments
January 25
Malawi's albinos are discriminated against. People are suspicious of their pale skin and yellow hair.
so they've formed the Albino Association of Malawi which is lobbying for such rights as an end to workplace discrimination and government aid for their unique medical needs. the ministry of health considers the group's demands reasonable and is working on solutions which would include education for comunities on how to look after albino children.
posted by palegirl at 9:18 PM PST - 3 comments
In case other forms of
augmentation isn't a viable option, now women can order
Bloussant, "
an all-natural herbal tablet, which, when taken daily will increase ... bust size by up to two cup sizes." The site also has the commercial for the product in Windows Media and QuickTime formats.
posted by tamim at 7:28 PM PST - 12 comments
Two of the biggest tech news sites seem to be coming up a little short in the creativity department.
ZDNet and
CNet News have both been redesigned recently, and their new similarities are astounding. Worse still, they both now feature
huge,
ugly ads (which we're supposed to "explore") that completely overwhelm the page.
posted by fraying at 6:40 PM PST - 24 comments
I'm something of a bibliophile; at age 17 I have a personal library of over 600 books and I read about 120 books every year. One of the cool things I discovered on the 'net last year was the growing number of personal book review sites. A couple of my favorites are
John Regehr's Book Pages and
Danny Yee's Book Reviews. Both sites provide literate, enjoyable commentary on a wide-range of books. Assignment: Anybody else out there found any good book review sites? If so,
please share and explain. :)
posted by hanseugene at 4:05 PM PST - 29 comments
"States' Rights" hit the UK?
First abolishing tuition fees, now providing long-term care for the elderly: the Scottish Executive is making life, um, "interesting" for its progenitor in Westminster. The downside of an unwritten constitution?
posted by holgate at 3:13 PM PST - 7 comments
Goodbye, farewell, and chicken butt.
One of the most brilliant comedy sites ever, Computer Stew, is going away. If you've never watched any of these amazingly funny web-shows you have about 24 hours to do so.
I highly recommend you do.
posted by bondcliff at 9:10 AM PST - 5 comments
We are the world.
No matter what you think of this expansion into Ecuador to stamp out the drug trade in Columbia, you have to love the great economic ramifications for locals as they open facilities and raise prices for their wealthy neighbors from the north. No mention, alas, of the prostitutes who usually move close to military facilities.
posted by Postroad at 6:58 AM PST - 5 comments
Statement of Senator Feinstein
opposing John Ashcroft. I hope he doesn't get in. A friend of mine told me he saw some "Roe v. Wade is dead" demonstrators on TV outside the capitol building and the first thing he thought was Triumph of the Will had descended upon Washington.
posted by kliuless at 6:53 AM PST - 5 comments
Strangest Story Ever Told - The Weird Legend of Jesus in Japan
Little known religious fact #2: Jesus didn't die up on his cross at Golgotha. That was actually his brother. Christ himself fled across Siberia and, after a brief detour through Alaska, landed in Japan, where he got married and raised a family.
Warning: some wacky religious notions will be mentioned in this article.
posted by lagado at 4:08 AM PST - 15 comments
Lisl Auman
will spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime that she didn't commit. I was made aware of this woman's plight by a brief mention in
Hunter S. Thompson's ESPN column. This woman is serving a life sentence for a murder that was commited while she was in police custody. Surely, a travesty such as this cannot stand.
posted by Optamystic at 2:18 AM PST - 7 comments
January 24
Hey Teen Activists! Want to protest the evil capitalist confab at the World Economic Forum in Davos, but you just don't have the time? Well, now you can! Thanks to revolutionary (no pun intended) Swiss technology,
hellomrpresident.com will allow you to send messages that will then be
projected via laser onto the side of a mountain overlooking Davos! Starts today at 1700, though it doesn't say whether that's UTC or local time. Five hours a day for five days. Let us know what you get projected! (They have a webcam up, so you may be able to grab a jpeg of your thought.)
posted by aaron at 11:18 PM PST - 9 comments
And you thought US environmental policies were bad.
Europe is facing a major environmental crisis that it
seems unwilling or unable to act on -- deforestation,
flooding, desertification and more. From the article:
"One fifth of the land in Spain is already so degraded
that it is turning to desert" -- and it's as bad if
not worse elsewhere on the continent & in Britain.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 8:35 PM PST - 2 comments
Google Editorializing?
Someone forwarded me this search on google. Look at the first link. Is this pure editorializing or just dumb (pardon the pun) luck?
posted by TNLNYC at 1:36 PM PST - 9 comments
The (Net) King is Dead! Long live the King!
Alas, Time Warner finds a way to repurpose it's dead Pathfinder into another of its new but also ailing properties. Didn't they learn the first time? Or is it more of a "Well, we have this highly visible domain...." Hmmmmm.
posted by bkdelong at 10:22 AM PST - 4 comments
This
is, of course, intended as humor, albeit rather coarse humor, but it's all too depressingly accurate. Why does customer service suck so badly these days? [Spotted at
Joel on Software, whom I haven't disagreed with much lately... probably because he hasn't
said much lately. :-)]
posted by baylink at 10:08 AM PST - 58 comments
Basques separatists: a long-standing problem
The Basque separatist movement is symptomatic of ethnic , religious, and cultural desire to be distinct and to have their own "place." And yet, at the same time, the world moves toward globalization, with economics becoming trans-national. A push and a pull at the same time. Can this contradiction be resolved without violence?
posted by Postroad at 9:15 AM PST - 4 comments
If you want to try playing with little planets or images of them, try visiting these websites...
Webearth -- builds a LIVE vrml model of the Earth as it is right now. It draws from current composite satellite photos. Or you can play with a VRML Moon, Venus, Mars or Jupiter, if you'd prefer. (Note: this site does require a VRML 2.0 compatible plug-in, like Parallel Graphics Cortona VRML Viewer.)
Here's an oldie, but a goodie... Same concept, just not live. Earth and Moon Viewer uses various static composite satellite images from many different points of view, and it lets you zoom in and out ... (to a certain extent).
Webwide World lets you zoom in on an earth-like planet... not quite the same thrill, but the images the site produces are beautifully gem-like. And the planet it produces is huge. You'll be able explore islands off the coasts of islands off the coasts of islands.
And for more satellite image zooming pleasure, you can't beat Microsoft's Terra Server.
posted by crunchland at 7:38 AM PST - 2 comments
Pope John Paul II has been busy protecting his conservative legacy by appointing
a record number of new cardinals. This expanded group of cardinals will vote for the next pontiff and so a continuation of the Church's present course on abortion and birth control is quite likely.
Still, it's a little known fact that the Vatican actually ceased to the home of the
true Catholic Church on
October 9th, 1959 and that John Paul II is, in fact, a
heretical anti-pope.
posted by lagado at 3:57 AM PST - 26 comments
January 23
Telegraph Codes.
Was doing some searching the other day to remind myself what code traditionally goes at the end of a wire story (it's "-30-" of course) and stumbled upon this gem. Best of all, it's not political.
posted by kindall at 8:34 PM PST - 4 comments
San Francisco Muni to consider naming stations after advertisers.
If you've been in SF (or any major US city) recently, you've probably noticed the buses covered with ads inside and out, the two stadiums named after corporations (all US stadiums seem to be now), and subway platforms coated in billboards. Now, they're considering selling the names of each station off to the highest bidder. Is this going too far or should a city do anything to make a buck?
(I'm reminded of the book Generation X where the author jokes about rampant advertising, and how one day you'll ask your friend what time it is, and he'll simply say "Pepsi")
posted by mathowie at 4:09 PM PST - 40 comments
Cookie the clown
died yesturday. My favorite clown of the long running 'Bozo Show' recorded in Chicago.
"I am the luckiest guy in the world to have worked at a job I loved, and I'm going to miss it dearly," Brown said upon his retirement in 1994.
posted by john at 3:58 PM PST - 3 comments
Ashcroft sings!
Actually, seems like it was 4 or 5 years ago, but hey, it's still catchy. MP3 contained at link to TheSmokingGun.com
posted by daver at 3:03 PM PST - 5 comments
'Chinese' New Year news fest
The generally wonderful Guardian Weblog has a special page of hard-hitting Chinese news links in honor of Lunar New Year beginning Jan. 24. (Commonly called Chinese New Year, but the Vietnamese celebrate it, too.) These include a link to a
Foreign Affairs discussion of the Tiananmen Papers, believed to be internal Chinese documents about the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. (Earlier MeFi linkage of a Tiananmen Papers article can be found
here.
posted by jhiggy at 11:48 AM PST - 1 comments
A while back, you'll remember, a professor from Princeton cracked the SDMI watermark, but couldn't publish [
MeFi search], and weren't awarded the prize because they wouldn't NDA. Well, a French team has also cracked it, and not being bound by the US DMCA,
they've published. Good thing? Or bad?
posted by baylink at 11:47 AM PST - 3 comments
Darwin's Paradise Lost.
I'm really suprised no one's mentioned the oil spill that's threatening some of the most rarest animals in the world right now. With oil spill after oil spill, it really amazes me that we're not experimenting with safer,
cleaner fuels. Although I wonder what would happen to wildlife should you spill 144,000 gallons of
ethanol or
biodiesel....though you can't really spill
hydrogen or
solar fuel, can you?
posted by bkdelong at 11:12 AM PST - 17 comments
A guy paid $5000 to a bank
for a list of 4 million credit card numbers, complete with name/address of the owners. He proceeded to start making false charges to those cards totalling some $37 million. He's going to jail. My question is, what the
hell was the bank thinking? Why are they selling something like that? Didn't they recognize the potential for abuse? What possible legitimate use could such a list have?
posted by Steven Den Beste at 8:47 AM PST - 8 comments
dumb.
(but then again, posting a large image file isn't really clever either.)
posted by tiaka at 7:53 AM PST - 15 comments
News.com gets redesigned
and ordinarily I wouldn't consider this newsworthy, but the incredible overrun of annoyingly large banner & Flash ads is the matter at hand here.
posted by hijinx at 6:12 AM PST - 32 comments
Armenian holocaust
You accuse Turkey of what they did to the Armenians--all a part of history--and you lose out. Thus, the Unite;d States has yet to cite Turkey, our needed ally, of what is known to have taken place, despite the many protests from the Armenian community in America.
posted by Postroad at 5:49 AM PST - 5 comments
January 22
One wo/man; many, many votes.
From the seventh circle of hell comes the second-last sign of the apocalypse; the voting form for the bloggies. I know which site I voted for... you're reading the damn thing right now. Go MeFi!
posted by Neale at 9:19 PM PST - 38 comments
Jesus gets his own Theme Park
This strikes me as bit too odd to appeal to many, but maybe I just don't appreciate the idea of laser shows combined with Hebrew prayers or chomping a hot dog at the site of crucifixion.
posted by tdstone at 5:48 PM PST - 18 comments
Erik Davis on Feed:
"I feel compelled to mention the strangely underreported fact that, thanks to the FCC, all U.S. cell phones will soon be required to pack GPS units (or some equivalent tech) that will allow their location to be fixed the moment that 911 is dialed... the FCC has also ruled that wireless carriers, and not users, own GPS location data, and can freely sell it to third parties... your radio-cum-PDA-cum-cell phone... may want to tell you about the great deal on Beanie Babies or Canons 15 x 45 image-stabilized binoculars that awaits you two shops down to the right."
posted by Tubes at 1:40 PM PST - 19 comments
John Gilmore (via Wes Felter) lets the dogs out
on the new Mac DVD-R drive. Seems it's a DVD-General drive, rather than a DVD-Authoring drive, and, therefore, there are lots of things you might want to do with it that you can't.
This is how Apple can fit a $4500 drive into a $3500 machine.
posted by baylink at 12:09 PM PST - 23 comments
First day in office
and this is what we get. Dubya cuts off U.S. funds to international family-planning groups offering abortion and abortion counseling. Why do I get the feeling this is only a calm before the storm?
posted by NickBarat at 9:32 AM PST - 68 comments
Co$ Tackiness
The Church of Scientology spinoff Narconon completely rips off the Urban75 Web site (including similar meta tag content). Jeeze....talk about unabashed design stealing.
posted by bkdelong at 8:24 AM PST - 6 comments
organ transplant needs
Only the extreme of religious people might object to organ transplants, but what do we do with an increasing need and insufficient donors?
posted by Postroad at 6:03 AM PST - 33 comments
Erasing the Jewish past in Israel?
Some months ago I had read that there was an attempt being made to eliminate traces of the Jewish past in and near sacred Jewish shrines in order to make Israeli claims invalid in any forthcoming peace talks....is this an example of what was meant?
posted by Postroad at 4:08 AM PST - 13 comments
January 21
"One giant leap backward for sports womankind."
Playboy runs an article about female sports-casters. (ESPN and ABC told them to "get stuffed" when asked for photos and bios.
Bravo!) And there was a reader poll. The winner of the poll was supposed to get an offer of a million bucks to do a nude pictorial in the mag. (She declined. An even bigger
Bravo!) More interesting is that third place in the poll went to woman who described herself as having "reached the 175-pound mark during her third pregnancy, at age 38". (I wonder if it was a protest vote, like when "
Hank the angry drunken dwarf won People Magazine's online "Most beautiful people" poll. [I voted for him.]) Of course, the kicker is that Playboy is run by
Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter. He retired from the business a long time ago. So, today's quiz: Is Christie Hefner a symbol of the success of American Womanhood, or a traitor to the cause?
posted by Steven Den Beste at 5:03 PM PST - 43 comments
"The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we
can imagine." I defy anyone to read
this and not find at least one thing which dumbfounds them. For me: the woman with the knife in her neck, Canadian election open mike gaff, C***fest at Penn State, obscene Furby, the dominatrix who lost one and what she did.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 4:19 PM PST - 3 comments
A unusually even-handed article
about Ecstasy use. The author describes his own experiences in the mid-80s with the now-popular drug . Nice to see a mainstream publication tackling this issue in the right way.
posted by brittney at 1:34 PM PST - 11 comments
"Every school has its story, every room its ghost."
Ian Dugay writes about the terrors of elementary school; his experience might be rather particular (if you read it, you'll understand that I don't mean that in a Columbine kind of way), but he can't be the only one with unpleasant memories -- how do
you remember grade school?
posted by lia at 10:44 AM PST - 17 comments
From the Bad-Rumors-That-Unfortunately-Turn-Out-To-Be-True Department:
Britney Spears
confirms duet with Madonna. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
(I admire Madonna's knack for perpetual self-reinvention and surprising everyone with what she's cooked up next, but really, this is something I'm sure I'd be
quite happy to live without.)
posted by lia at 7:51 AM PST - 34 comments
Steve Jobs on selling apps based on life beyond the Net
"I edited a digital movie of my children using our iMovie software," he said. "It took me about an hour, and when I showed it to my wife, she started crying. It was clearly the most emotional thing I've ever done on a computer in my life." ...
"The Internet is a wonderful thing and for a while it was such a blinding bright light that it obscured every other bright light," he said. "It's a wonderful thing, it's a magical thing, but there are other wonderful things too. Music is a wonderful thing. Movies are wonderful things."
posted by allaboutgeorge at 3:52 AM PST - 13 comments
Global Trends 2015
A paper published under authority of the Director of Central Intelligence. In which, we find the CIA believes US global influence [will] wane and that countries which fail to benefit from globalization, are prone to internal conflicts, and risk state failure.
I can see Uncle Sam pointing and saying Shapen up, or
else.
posted by capt.crackpipe at 2:18 AM PST - 23 comments
January 20
Alternative Television.
Until I saw this show, it had never occured to me that the television medium was conducive to producing anything that could be labelled as 'art'. I would rather watch this than one more minute of 'standard network programming.'
posted by kristin at 12:55 PM PST - 6 comments
"Mistakes We Knew We Were Making"
Dave Eggers' new appendix for the paperback edition of
AHWOSG, extends the self-analysis even further. "Typical conversation a month after publication: 'Would it be possible to remove my name?' 'Of course.' 'Why?' 'Well, no offence, but I really didn't think anyone would see the damn book.'"
posted by holgate at 10:40 AM PST - 11 comments
Clinton stressed that most of the people he would pardon have long since paid their debt to society and that the main intent of his executive action was to lift restrictions on voting and employment.
That explains why Patti Hearst and the presidents brother gets one, and Leonard Peltier does not. I guess Bill know which side his is buttered on, and realizes he is going to be spending way more time with the FBI than with Indians in the coming years.
Who else should have been pardoned? Who should not have?
posted by thirteen at 7:38 AM PST - 16 comments
Is
this the next
Craig Shergold? A hundred and fourteen
thousand emails so far and it's only going to get worse. Will it mutate? (The Shergold story has appeared in different versions.) I think this will be around for a long time. "The only mistake Street said he made is not including an end date. He doesn't know if the responses will ever stop." Hoo boy. No kidding.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 4:22 AM PST - 7 comments
Bill Maher savagely attacks the handicapped.
I know its not the brightest or wittiest of shows, but I was amazed when I read the transcript for this episode of Politically Incorrect from last week. Skim the assaults on the overweight at the beginning if you like, but the real action is in the last topic of conversation before the show is over, where Bill compares mentally handicapped children to dogs and Martin Short calls him a "hideous, cold person."
posted by ztt at 12:49 AM PST - 49 comments
January 19
Government hacking abound!
I hate it when a group of kids do a big .gov and .mil defacement. Then all the other kids start puffing themselves up and try to outdo each other. S'cuse me while I break out my virtual lawnchair... and please pass the mint julep.
posted by bkdelong at 10:40 PM PST - 3 comments
Dakar 2001
the 10,000+ km auto rally ends this Sunday. In recent years the rally has lost its luster. Even the website does not look exciting.
posted by tamim at 10:34 PM PST - 1 comments
This guy
thinks all natural deaths are caused by vitamin or mineral deficiencies. And is a great read. Imagine Ross Perot saying this:
Well, when I practised for 12 years up in Portland, somebody'd come to me with a headache. Never had one, and I'd just walk up to them and tap them on their sinuses, and if they collapsed to their knees, they'd know they had a sinus headache. "Oh Doc, why'd you do that?" Well, that's a cheap lab test. Then if they had blood dripping out of their nose, it would take a $35 x-ray to see if they had a cancer in there. 35 bucks and a free lab test as opposed to 421 bucks.
I'm pretty sure he's a nut. But you can never tell.
posted by norm at 9:31 PM PST - 5 comments
