~metafilter | Bookmarks (1009)

The Naming of America - "To question the origin of America's name is to question the nature of not only our history lessons but our very identity as Americans." [Naming of the Americas, Origin of the name America (via 47:55 ;)]

Answers found in prehistoric cold case at 8-million-year-old fossil bed. Palaeontologists working near Alice Springs uncover for the first time a set of articulated bones and partial skeleton of Ilbandornis woodburnei, a massive bird that once roamed an evolving continent 8 million years ago.

'My slogan is very simple: no education, just liberation!' – Béla Tarr on how film can fight the political right in Hungary.' Two Films by Béla Tarr. 'Werckmeister Harmonies' (2000) and 'The Turin Horse' (2011).CW (violence)

Manizha Talash (previously) of the Refugee Olympic Team was disqualified in the first round of the Breaking competition for displaying a cape emblazoned with "FREE AFGHAN WOMEN" in the middle of her head-to-head with B-girl India.

Canada's $100-billion food-service industry, struggling with labour shortages, is leaning on a vulnerable workforce in record numbers. (slStar, but is an archive.ph link; OG link if you want it)Certain kinds of white Canadians are on a tear right now against immigrants due to unaffordable housing and unemployment, but honestly these two snippets from the article told me all I need to know about those...

Rival monkey gangs terrorise Thai city, mugging and assaulting schoolkids and tourists. Thousands of long-tail macaques are following increasingly aggressive ringleaders into attacks on tourists and schoolkids, and now they're wising up to the "Anti-Monkey Unit's" tactics, leaving the town no choice but to try and round them up before they storm another police station.

Massive wind turbine blade hits bridge, gets knocked off truck on Route 1 in Maine. Workers in orange and yellow safety vests admire the behemoth while making plans to get this over-over-over-sized load moving again.

This is the closing weekend of the Olympics, and Sally Jenkins is celebrating some of Team USA's athletic geeks in The Washington Post: So many of us, normal people, stroll through the world hoping to project nonchalance because we suppose it means effortlessness — when, really, it's a kind of abdication. That way, we never really have to lose at anything.Of course, this observation...

Saturday Night Live: The Game has received little attention on BoardGameGeek, and but little attention on its 2010 release. If games aren't your thing, you can collect the SNL action figures. Perhaps fine art is more your thing? Last but not least, for a view of the panoply of SNL-iana, you can visit a famed online purveyor of resold corporate schlock.Previously, Live from New...

From the beginning, intarsia has served as a projection of imperial singularity and superiority. According to Maurice Sven Dimand, the first specialized curator of Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum, the technique arrived in the cathedrals of Europe via Andalusia and Sicily from the mosques and minarets of North Africa, where, due to the prohibition on graven images, it was useful in effecting...

Workers carry in 350 tonnes of material by hand for manual glow-worm tunnel upgrade. Tradies upgrading a glow-worm tunnel in New South Wales had to get creative to ensure the worms remained safe, but were treated to a daily light show as they worked.

The only thing as fascinating as opulent wealth is its sudden disintegration Candice and Brandon Miller showed the public a world of glittering parties and vacations. The money to sustain it did not exist.In the modern Gilded Age of New York, where Instagram is awash in unrestrained displays of wealth, Brandon and Candice Miller were royalty. At their 10th wedding anniversary "Midsummer Night's Dream"...

Emily Wilson has translated the Iliad and Odyssey, and teaches classics at the University of Pennsylvania. Recently, she was interviewed ...by the journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research.A friend of mine served as the go-between to try to facilitate an introduction with this month's guest. I did not do a good enough job explaining my reasons for wanting to interview her, so I can...

With Kamala Harris' Vice President pick Tim Walz rapidly becoming everyone's favorite dad and Mr. Rogers substitute, Jason Cosper's Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle -- a rif on Mat Honan's 2008 Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle (yes, you are that old now) -- has collected a singularity's worth of wholesome male role model positivity.Hidden in the source, you can say hi to Cosper...

Three young boys, the most famous dinosaur in history, and a prehistoric discovery that left them speechless. Two young brothers and their cousin made the discovery of a lifetime whilst hiking in North Dakota — a T-rex fossil poking out of the ground.

Spiders of Paradise is an upcoming exhibit of large scale portraits of tiny colorful Peacock Spiders (Genus Maratus) by artist Maria Fernanda Cardosa. Here's a short video about the project.

"You probably know the start of this Olympic story, but do you know how it finished?" Before coming to the Olympics, Equatorial Guinea's Eric Moussambani had never seen a 50m pool. Aaron Smith tells us an incredible story that starts with 'Eric the Eel' answering a call for volunteers, and ends in a way you might not expect.

"With a Boob Out" is the new music video from Australian folk music singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alana Wilkinson. [Despite the title and the use of the word "boob" this post is entirely SFW]Wilkinson's debut album Half-Time Oranges comes out soon and additional tracks are available for preview on Bandcamp. The internet is loaded with funny social media people making little songs and some of...

Israel Accused of Running "Torture Camps" as Video Emerges of Soldiers Raping Palestinian Prisoner - Democracy Now covers the days-old story that's still not quite got any significant coverage in Western media: 'The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has published a major new report documenting how the Israeli prison system has become "a network of torture camps," where physical, psychological and sexual abuse of...

NYT: Wirecutter takes on the perennial question "Frankly, some people are just monsters. And those monsters are our loved ones."I just found this hilarious. The author suggests finding different ways to store and replace the toilet paper, but in the end (har)... "Investigate why your current dispenser isn't functional for your family: You asked why your family can't manage this simple task. I don't...

YouTube: Democracy Manifest. Jack Karlson (may be an alias) has passed away, aged 82. BBC: A man responsible for one of the most viral clips in Australian history has died at the age of 82. The prison escapee and on-again off-again petty criminal ... shot to fame in 2009, after a clip of his dramatic 1991 arrest outside a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane was...

Unusual and often breathtaking, the genre is relatively unknown in the West. Lovely article introducing and situating North Korean science fiction as its own genre

The transformative power of a northern Canadian wrestling tour. Sonya Ballantyne and Stephan Peterson directed The Death Tour, about a Northern Manitoba indie wrestling circuit.