July 24
On a sunny May morning, six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor's office closed in on a small apartment in Amsterdam. Their quarry: a skinny Dutch cartoonist with a rude sense of humor. Informed that he was suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities, the Dutchman surrendered without a struggle.
"
I never expected the Spanish Inquisition," recalls
Gregorius Nekschot, the cartoonist.
posted by plexi at 12:31 PM -
48 comments
July 23
A linguist and a sociologist at Hebrew Union College have teamed up to
track the inroads made into American English by words and idioms from traditionally Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and Hebrew.
They've created an online survey and are looking for people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds to answer a few questions about their word choices, phrasing, and pronunciation. They're also trying to determine whether certain linguistic quirks usually attributed to Yiddish's influence are actually carried over from Jewish ancestors' speech patterns and accents, or whether they're merely an artifact from growing up in or near New York City. [
via]
posted by Asparagirl at 8:21 PM -
59 comments
Artweaver is a freeware "natural media" paint program, of the same type as Corel Painter. Natural media means it uses tools that are intended to simulate actual art tools, like oils, pastels, pencils and so forth. It's not as feature-rich as Painter, but it's getting better.
[more inside]
posted by JHarris at 4:17 PM -
20 comments
The Devastation of Iraq's Past. "Since the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in April 2003, the international press has accorded considerable space to the country's imperiled ancient heritage. Much of this coverage, however, has been devoted to the museum, the impressive campaign to recover its stolen works, and the continued struggle to reopen its galleries. Only occasional, anecdotal reports—mostly from the first year of the conflict—have borne witness to
large-scale plunder of archaeological sites, to which the damage is irreversible."
posted by homunculus at 1:10 PM -
9 comments
We all nurse private ambitions. Essam Ahmed Eid, a 53-year-old Egyptian man living in Vegas and dealing poker at the Bellagio, dreamed of becoming a hit man. He longed to take off the casino clown suit, the Nehru shirt and simpering smile — and replace them with a gun and a grimace. So Eid did what any enterprising 21st century contract killer would: He created a Web site — www.hitmanforhire.net —
and waited for the clients to come.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:38 PM -
28 comments
"I haven’t figured out whether cracking open your computer, attaching it to an Underwood typewriter, then inserting it into a combination Victorian mantel clock/desk and calling it “The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine” is some sort of daft wit or evidence of a pedantry bordering on the pathological. " -
Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design, design writer Randy Nakamura takes a look at the Steampunk phenomenon.
posted by Artw at 11:09 AM -
106 comments
The UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History has an extensive,
searchable online collection. It focuse on material art and household items and has objects from all over the world. The website can be browsed either by geographic orgin:
Africa,
Asia,
North and Central America,
Pacific,
South America, or through its two exhibits,
Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives and
Fowler in Focus. Some of my favorite objects (but really, everything is entrancing) are
The Blind Scholar (
a Taiwanese handpuppet),
Chikunga (
a Zambian mask) and a
stirrup spout bottle which looks like a puma eating a piglet (
Peruvian). All items have accompanying descriptions and some have short texts or audioguides with further information.
posted by Kattullus at 9:36 AM -
3 comments
Google is testing a Digg-like social interface to Google Search results, Techcrunch has an early
preview video. This is bad news for Jimy Wales's
Wikia since this is what they have been trying to build. Perhaps related it looks like
Google is buying Digg.
posted by stbalbach at 6:31 AM -
59 comments
July 22
Butch Cassidy wanted to call his gang The Train Robber's Syndicate, but the name never stuck. The gang's core members - most notable among them
The Sundance Kid - and a revolving cast of supporting outlaws were most commonly called The
Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and
The Wild Bunch, and their goal was to be the most successful train robbers in history. The
Butch and Sundance site is a comprehensive collection of "the hundreds, if not thousands, of theories, legends and folk tales" surrounding the gang, including an exhaustive
list of biographies of the members, their associates, the lawmen who pursued them and the women who loved them, an
archive of transcribed news articles dating from the 1880s (including a
letter to the editor from Sundance himself), a
picture gallery and more.
[more inside]
posted by amyms at 11:39 PM -
26 comments
In January of 2004, Disney
shut down their Florida animation studio, part of their decision to
move away from 2D, or cell-shaded, animation
for good. Two years later, as part of the new deal with Pixar, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were brought in as heads of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and promptly declared that 2-D Animation would thrive again on their watch. For their first new project, the team wanted to show support for the still-struggling New Orleans, and simultaneously introduce
Disney's first Black Princess in
"The Frog Princess" (Or
The Princess and the Frog, as it is now known), a fairy tale set in 1920's Jazz-era Louisiana, with Randy Newman providing a
period-specific score.
Much response to the project has been
quite positive, but as with all things,
the devil is in the details.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:46 PM -
105 comments
For years,
Wired magazine has tapped a bevy of designers and artists in the tech field to craft detailed visions of futuristic objects for a monthly showcase at the close of each issue. Now, after
hinting as much in the July edition, it is clear that that the tradition of FOUND
has been brought to an end. What better way to say goodbye to this whimsical feature than by taking a look back at the full archived run of the series?
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:42 PM -
28 comments
Now Viacom will STEAL your movie Viacom has claimed ownership of an independent filmmaker's film and now she has to fight them for it. They allow her to leave it on YouTube but they claim ownership and they get to collect data on who's watching.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:30 PM -
47 comments
What's the second most popular sport in the world after soccer?
Badminton. (According to
some sources - volleyball and cricket are also contenders.) When played competitively, badminton looks more like
this and less like
this. The
Chinese are poised to win Gold in Beijing, while the American team, featuring star player
Howard Bach gets
no love.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 1:16 PM -
31 comments
In the summer of 1897, the Devil transported a
minor Decadent poet named Enoch Soames one hundred years into the future to see what posterity would make of
his work. The only witness to the affair was the parodist
Max Beerbohm, whose
account of Soames and his journey ensured that at 2:10 P.M. on June 7, 1997, some dozen pilgrims waited in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum
to see the poet appear...
posted by Iridic at 10:58 AM -
26 comments
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