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Xin Hai Tong 23, 0 knots.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:34 PM on May 24, 2023

As we float, stuck aground, without care
It's more fun to do things as a pair.
It's a boon without price
To do something twice:
Islands in the stream, that's what we are
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:45 PM on May 24, 2023

In Australia she has a legacy of an extraordinary pair of promotions she did for rugby league, which are cultural touchstones here in their own right; for simply the best, and what you get is what you see from 1989, one of the horniest things ever shown on television.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:27 PM on May 24, 2023

ANCIENTS OF MU
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:00 PM on May 23, 2023

These are the kind of people who will never get invited to get nude and conspiratorial at the Bohemian Grove, and know it. The shittiest Illuminati.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:25 PM on May 23, 2023

But Zannini warns that protecting these places will require more than simply integrating them into national protected-area networks. Many sacred natural sites, he says, are distinctive precisely because they exist separate from official conservation

That's right. In Australia there's a great tension between Aboriginal people and communities, who retain knowledge about specific important sites, and which are often secret, or which should be known only to groups, e.g. men,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:55 PM on May 18, 2023

If there is a doctrine underpinning both rationalist and postrationalist thought, it is this quintessential liberal faith in human potential, combined with an awareness of the way in which human imaginal power does not merely respond to, but actively shapes, the world around us

WALTER SOBCHAK: No, Donny, these men are Whigs, there's nothing to be afraid of.

Well, except for the Weird Catholics, who boring suburban ex-Catholics like me, while… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:12 PM on May 17, 2023

I will add that all the descriptions of the contemplative virtues of baseball in this article, its deeply human patterns and subtlety, apply even more strongly to cricket.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:39 PM on May 17, 2023

I have not much to add except to say this is a great article, well found and good post.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:49 PM on May 17, 2023

Platys in the Nasho?
Platys in the Nasho!
PLATYS IN THE NASHO
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:39 PM on May 14, 2023

How about you, will you miss AM?

In Australia, AM radio is where people go for emergency information in bushfire/flood and other disasters (because the national broadcaster, ABC, stops its usual broadcasts to act as an information channel). If AM is phased out of new cars here, it is going to be a very bad outcome.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:17 PM on May 14, 2023

WE'RE PUTTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:46 PM on May 11, 2023

Free Bird and Let It Be? Why not the trifecta of interminability

I draw your attention to Stairway to Heaven, with Lizzo
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:19 PM on May 11, 2023

Well since my baby left me / I've found a new place to dwell / it's down in the sea off Stockton Beach / a seahorse hotel
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:19 PM on May 10, 2023

Projects like this are what makes the WWW, after all it has become, still worth it.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:02 PM on May 9, 2023

I once spoke to a carpenter whose specialty was windows, installing them, restoring them, repairing them. He said; windows are easy: it's all right angles, anyone can do it who can use a measuring tape and a saw, if you can draw a rectangle, you can make a window. The trick is, though, cutting right every time, not wasting material, working fast and correctly, installing on time and to budget, knowing what's gone wrong when you look at it, all at the same time, are extremely difficult, and takes… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:26 PM on May 9, 2023

This is excellent! I take part in a yearly state-wide training exercise held at the Wellington Caves complex, on Wiradjuri country; we practice rescue techniques around the caves. It's limestone karst, and just a stunningly beautiful part of the world, but huge areas are marked 'do not enter', since it's covered in random holes you don't see until you put your foot in one. When we go into the caves we often find animal bones, or even relatively fresh animal carcasses, because they fall in and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:20 PM on May 4, 2023

Honestly the way they started the first film with Paul Atreides' motorcycle accident on Caladan, then moving almost straight to the desert and his horror-attraction for the war, was clever. The adaptation of the book's really ambiguous telling of Paul's experience with the Harkonnens in Deraa (or whatever happened to him there) was done about as well as you could for the 1960s. Omar Sharif as Stilgar was an inspired bit of casting, but Alec Guinness in brownface as Duke Leto hasn't stood up to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:07 PM on May 3, 2023

I, your name, pledge allegiance to Hedy Lamarr, that's Hedley, and to the evil for which he stands
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:44 PM on May 2, 2023

we can acknowledge that some British rituals with ancient power and justified provenance genuinely do have cultural significance, and speak to the weird and eerie nature of that society.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:10 PM on May 3, 2023

I refute it, thus!

[Berkeley pulls the plug]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:09 PM on May 1, 2023

Paradox: all of the learning being described in the thread shows young people developing intellectual curiosity, will, and resilience, but without any kind of formal philosophical basis to learning. That’s in contrast to the actual classes being described, which start with the first philosophical principles, but always seem to fail to develop the intellectual personality traits. Notice how different children’s reactions are, in either case, to failing once!

Anyway I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:26 PM on April 27, 2023

‘I knew about Eric Clapton’s public and unrecanted racism, but vaccine conspiracy is too far’
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:15 PM on April 23, 2023

Also, rightly and wrongly, Public Enemy are very lucky not to have made it onto this list a couple of times.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:37 PM on April 23, 2023

Actually in terms of music business decisions with consequences, one that should have made it was the Dixie Chicks’ decision to oppose the Iraq War. History has shown them to be right, completely, but it cost them.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:50 AM on April 24, 2023

Good, next job stop punitively deporting NZ citizens who lack Aus passports (also true of every other nationality, but the NZ arrangement should be so easy).
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:34 AM on April 24, 2023

The joke behind the classic Road Runner cartoons is that the Coyote is fixated on bringing new innovations without testing them (as a parody of modernity) and he fails, and fails, and fails, because his ego is bigger than his aptitude, and because he doesn’t care. That’s either not funny as a premise any more, or it could be very funny and very pointed…
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:06 PM on April 20, 2023

Also in Australia, apparently (which like the other places mentioned has a very large diaspora/migrant/temporary worker Chinese community).

Thing about the Cold War is, the US won it by driving a schism between Russia and China

If we’re going to discuss America-centrism, the Sino-Soviet split had almost nothing to do with the US at all, and Deng’s later economic shifts were not really prompted by exterior influence. This isn’t about imperialism,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:47 PM on April 19, 2023

There’s the world of difference between police liaison by official arrangements, and these shady halfway-stations, and IMO the conflation of them together is a weird ‘BUT AMERICA DOES THIS TOO’ both-sidesism that Americans bafflingly keep bringing back up to centre the evils of their own country. Come on Americans, it isn’t always about you.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:52 PM on April 19, 2023

As a professional heritagenik, I am at some level glad to read about the preservation of a song, the premise of which is the community shrugging at death, and two young people throwing something nameless and undescribed off the Tallahatchie bridge. That’s right.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:59 AM on April 18, 2023

Yes, it's Korobeiniki, a folk song.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:21 PM on April 18, 2023

base-25 for regularity

I used to work as a stocktaker, and base-5 for counting (i.e. tally) is how that work is done. We look at a group of objects and can see that there are five of them without having to add, where for most people as soon as there are more, it's a set of four and two, or three and three. So you make tallies of fives, then you bundle the fives in fives, then you bundle four five-fives and that's a hundred, which is a typical… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:51 PM on April 17, 2023

[news bulletin] And now we'll go to finance news to understand how the market is feeling today
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:28 PM on April 14, 2023

The government measures days lost due to industrial action but does it measure the loss of work productivity due to Zelda releases? It should
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:54 PM on April 14, 2023

Reports of this mode of development have popped up in Boston and Seattle, and it is even more common beyond our borders in parts of Vancouver, Belgrade, Sydney, and Hong Kong

I can't speak for the other cities on this list but it's certainly not true of Sydney; majority-residential or investment-only developments like these would be extremely difficult and probably uneconomical in the NSW planning system, as opposed to more suburban 'luxury' development; and Australia… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:31 PM on April 12, 2023

[stamps loudly on one ivory peg leg over to the taffrail of the Pequod]

A fishing horror story with a primer in economics and facts about the denizens of the deep you say
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:51 AM on April 11, 2023

As with all of these anecdotes about theft I am always astounded by the shitty ratio of ingenuity to payoff. There’s an extraordinary amount of expertise and problem solving ability going on here, as well as planning in detail and human organisation in the service of… stealing cars. It’s perverse.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:56 PM on April 9, 2023

FWIW violent confrontation with Nazis, followed by their subsequent effective mocking, is a great way to describe Mel Brooks' army service and career as director-producer, and I would regard him as an expert and role model in these matters
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:39 PM on April 5, 2023

I used to think the phenomenon of over-60 couples having one shared email address (bobandalice@hotmail, etc.) was a slightly gauche generational marker, but the more I read of the notion of household cognition labour, and thinking of the huge number of services that need email notification to work, the more I think the white hairs are onto something. Maybe I should propose a shared mailbox or alias…
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:00 PM on April 3, 2023

To follow eustatic’s point—in modern urban cities most of these formerly male-coded jobs have largely disappeared. Renters usually cannot lawfully paint, repair, maintain, upgrade etc. the physical parts of a household. (In NSW they had to change a law to allow picture hooks).

In their place we have the cognitive-administrative labour of dealing with the real estate agent’s property manager and their retained tradesperson to e.g. fix the toilet, mend a roof leak, or… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:33 PM on April 3, 2023

If you like Blurred Lines for the melody you’re going to love Curtis Mayfield
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:17 PM on April 2, 2023

I'm sure plenty of people are Christian by evangelical definition--accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, read the Bible, hold certain beliefs on personal conduct and act accordingly--but don't feel like they need to go to a physical church and have someone tell them what to do.

I’ll cop to this one, it describes my Catholicism really well. My outlooks and values are completely informed by an Anglo, suburban, Christian environment—in the West, how could they not be—and an… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:24 PM on April 2, 2023

The Assassination of Sonic The Hedgehog by the Coward Miles ‘Tails’ Power
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:43 PM on March 31, 2023

If you’d told me 20 years ago that having bearable coloured electric light would mean having to assess the quality of diodes and being able to set a colour at Kelvin through a settings menu in a phone, that can’t be shared between the different people who use a room, I’d have been annoyed at you
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:47 PM on March 30, 2023

As the saying goes, a ship can carry a boat but a boat can never carry a ship. So as it is for ATVs and cars.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:22 PM on March 26, 2023

[listens to Doritos and Fritos]

we must prepare ourselves, for the Fourth Wave of Ska is upon us, as was foretold in the prophecy
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:00 PM on March 26, 2023

Look say one thing for Mormons, they might be guided by God when it comes to marriage rules, but they do it knowing that their God has a track record of changing His mind when He needs to…
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:12 PM on March 24, 2023

majority rule [is] not an essential part of democracy

Unfortunately there’s more than enough historical example, and present day threat, to show the feasibility of minority rule.

The Friends are nice, cool people. They’ve got a peaceful Christianity and a decent intellectual tradition. What they don’t have—and actually existing democracies do—is a practice to deal with other groups of people who just fundamentally disagree with you, maybe even… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:01 PM on March 23, 2023

Domestic local content television rules and cocaine have so much to answer for
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:36 PM on March 21, 2023

Has a band ever put out an album as different from their debut just three years later?

I submit Alanis Morissette who in four years went from this to this.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:28 PM on March 21, 2023