~metafilter | Bookmarks (938)

Robert Lindsay showing how they do the Lambeth Walk. Performing the song at a Tony awards show, sometimes in the mid 80's.Quite skillful with that derby hat! There's a glimpse of a young Emma Thompson in here also.

An emperor penguin found malnourished on an Australian beach has been released into the Southern Ocean after a period of recovery. (Including 20 days of free fish, and a veterinary check.) The text article at the link includes a cheerful 2 minute video of the release itself.The penguin was found by local surfers at Ocean Beach, 430 kilometres south of Perth, on November 1....

'I still believe the puzzle of U.S. (non-state) political violence, particularly far-right political violence, is not "why is there so much," but why, given our relative legal leniency towards violent speech, freedom of association for radicals, the widespread availability of firearms, and a long, violent history of rightist street action against racial minorities and leftists, is there still so little.' In Will the Streets...

How to Write about Africa is a posthumous collection of essays by Binyavanga Wainaina. The satiric title essay, which went viral in 2005, began as "rambling email to the editor" of Granta, as he recounted in How to Write About Africa II: The Revenge. After publishing a celebrated memoir in 2011, he published a "lost chapter" from it in 2014, I am a homosexual,...

Satire is just dark comedy's alibi, a way for critics to render their attraction to the genre compatible with morality and self-respect. War is a satire on war in the same sense that getting shot is a satire on guns, or being trampled to death by a hippo is a satire on evolution, or junkies are a satire on drugs, or a piss stain...

"They did what they were supposed to do. This is why we need them," said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the groups challenging Georgia's abortion ban in court. "To have this abrupt disbandment, my concern is what we are going to lose in the process, in terms of time and data?" [propublica]

'The Reluctant Dragon and Mr Toad Show. 1970. (slyt, 22:59) "The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show is a 1970 American animated television series that aired on ABC's Saturday morning schedule. The show features two characters created by British children's writer Kenneth Grahame: the Reluctant Dragon from the 1898 short story of the same name, and Mr. Toad from the 1908 novel The Wind...

Most of Australia's First Nations languages don't have gendered pronouns. Here's why. Australia's 460 First Nations' languages see the world in unexpected ways, revealing perspectives on the natural and spiritual worlds.

"When we initially reached out to scores of chefs, recipe writers, historians, and food luminaries for nominations for their most important American recipes of the past 100 years—Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformative for American home cooking between 1924 and 2024?—we expected strong opinions, but we didn't anticipate the philosophical quandaries that adjudicating and assembling them would bring up." The...

Last week, bible scholar, author, vlogger (and owner of one of the finest t-shirt collections in town) Dan McClellan posted a video asking the question Did God choose an adulterous man to rule his nation? Apparently some viewers took issue with Dan's message, so he immediately posted a followup video, On the intersection of some of my research & politics making abundantly clear what...

Cormac McCarthy's Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: "I Loved Him. He Was My Safety." by Vincenzo Barney"I loved him more than anything. He kept me safe, gave me protection. He was everything to me. Everything. He was my anchor. He was my world. He was my home, even when we didn't live together anymore. Those things that happen to you,...

In the sixteenth century, new printing technology meant that the works of one author could be bound, identified, and replicated. The idea of an autonomous, original creator became central to our culture. Gone were the collaborative days of monks accreting their manuscripts collectively. A century or more of audio-visual technology has slowly eroded that idea. Ever since radio, we have become increasingly less bound...

Oculi Mundi is a digital heritage destination: the home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, globes and books of knowledge. The project now includes a podcast, What's your map, which starts with William Dalrymple's exploration of an 18th century Jain cosmological map.

Enter your date of birth and a guess at your life expectancy, then choose from a list of movies. Memento Movi then shows a frame from that movie that represents your place in your lifespan. So, for instance, a twenty-year-old who selects Star Wars will likely get a frame from Tattooine, but a sixty-year-old who selects Jaws will be on the boat. [via condour75's...

Soundac Film Productions was a small company that produced animation for television. they made info cards and maps for use on news broadcasts, short bits for use as station IDs and over 4,000 commercials. They're perhaps best known for producing Colonel Bleep, the mostly-lost first color cartoon made for TV, and fitness cartoon Mighty Mister Titan. Ziggy Cashmere tracked down Scott Schleh, the son...

Dockyard in Kent, England searching for chief scorpion wrangler. The Blue Town Heritage Centre on the Isle of Sheppey is advertising for a chief scorpion wrangler to keep an eye on a colony of scorpions which have been living in the walls of Sheerness Dockyard, opposite the centre, for more than 200 years.Centre boss Jenny Hurkett, 75, said: "They are one of our island's...

First, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America encouraged the people to be virtuous, in recognition that corruption is a problem that cannot be solved by law.Second, James Madison, author of Federalist Paper 10 intended that the government discourage any one faction from seizing power by managing the sizes of groups that govern and are governed. Too few people leads to monarchy...

April this year saw the premiere of History... by Mary Lou Williams, completed forty years posthumously by composer Anthony Kelley [transcript]. Williams grew up in Pittsburgh, was instrumental shaping the sound of 1940s big bands and later bebop, for instance writing In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee. She went on to release celebrated solo albums, such as Black Christ of the Andes, and larger compositions,...

I can't think of a single role where I would say, Man, that's me. Entirely me? No, no. First of all, they're lines that you read and you learn, and that's how that person talks. Sure, there has to be pieces of what you've done in who you are, and hopefully there's pieces of who you are in what you've done. My mother used...

TWENTY YEARS AGO TONIGHT -- Malice at the Palace, November 19, 2004: The Detroit Pistons, former champs of basketball from the 2003-04 season, were hosting the Indiana Pacers in their home arena, The Palace of Auburn Hills, for an early game of the new season. The Pacers took an early lead and held it, thanks mostly to 6'11" center Jermaine O'Neal and well-known hothead...

During the pandemic, the town of Bremerton, Washington installed a little Take A Poem, Leave A Poem box. Liminal Garrett bemoaned the fact that there's never any poems to take. So they took the box's plight to the internet: use this form to send them a poem, they'll print it out and put it in the box for others to take!

Tarantula venom study could help epilepsy patients like this toddler who's had 50 ambulance rides before her third birthday. The study will test spider venom molecules against brain tissue made from the blood of individual epilepsy patients.

The Colour Literacy Project "The Colour Literacy Project is a 21st century initiative that recognizes colour as a meta-discipline. Our mission is to provide state-of-the-art educational resources that strengthen the bridges between the sciences, arts, design and humanities in order to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. " [via: Is color even real?]