Child desperately wants a dog. However, I like having a quiet, clean and orderly house. Also, prefer not to spend a lot of time OR money on care. We also travel semi-regularly and are frequently not at home during the day. Would a very small, low maintenance, well trained adult dog be a possibility or just a bad idea all together? Never had a dog before, so I don't know the realities of it other than what I've read in books and online. Any advice appreciated.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by roaring beast at 1:11 PM on November 8, 2023 (66 comments)

MLB’s plan to integrate Negro League numbers and statistical legacies with its own remains years from completion. More than two years after its announcement, MLB is still in the initial phase of the project: data acquisition. (archive.today link)
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 8:12 AM on May 11, 2023 (14 comments)

When I was 6 years old my mind was blown by sci-fi TV serial Sapphire and Steel, with its stories of inter-dimensional slippage, time-shuffling wonkiness, and not entirely logical plot resolution. Revisiting it 40 years later, I'm ready to be disappointed. But it's actually good. Worth watching just for the stars, Joanna Lumley as TV's most fashion-conscious time-manipulating psychic alien, and David McCallum as her permanently-scowling colleague. All episodes are on shoutfactorytv.com (US) and itv.com (UK). Previously.
posted to MetaFilter by mokey at 10:04 AM on April 27, 2023 (42 comments)

He was actually a celebrity in Afghanistan, the violinist for the on-screen backup band for their version of American Idol (Single link Threadreader, original Twitter thread). He had heard through a friend about an Afghan violinist who had just escaped from Kabul and settled in LA (where I live). Problem was the guy had to leave his violin behind.
posted to MetaFilter by spamandkimchi at 10:29 AM on April 20, 2023 (2 comments)

Brandon Johnson has defeated Paul Vallas in a close race; here is reporting on ward-by-ward turnout and voting. In a race that was sort of a Teachers Union versus Police Union showdown, the teachers won.
posted to MetaFilter by kensington314 at 10:34 AM on April 5, 2023 (22 comments)

Attila Kobori & Leo Lorenzo compete at the Bavarian Open 2022, dancing to Janele Monae's Make Me Feel. [dance is ~2m30, there's info about the Open afteward, 3m21s total] Honestly, this happened in Munich just a few weeks ago and I find it thrilling to watch.
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 5:57 PM on October 30, 2022 (8 comments)

“Autism is a Spectrum” Doesn’t Mean What You Think
posted to MetaFilter by aniola at 10:49 AM on September 17, 2022 (36 comments)

To read a beautiful article by Leslie Jamison in The New Yorker about the history and impact of the Choose Your Own Adventure books (Wikipedia), complete with choices for how to navigate the article, follow this link.

To comment about the article, or the books in general, click
posted to MetaFilter by Westringia F. at 2:48 PM on September 13, 2022 (35 comments)

“Inclusivity might not mean everybody,” Lin writes. “It could indicate the rest of us.” Emily Witt takes on Feeld, the inclusive and curious hookup app.
posted to MetaFilter by burningyrboats at 8:13 AM on July 13, 2022 (33 comments)

I have a vague recollection of a compilation album of obscure, regional-label '60s-'70s soul/r&b music.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by box at 6:50 AM on June 18, 2022 (2 comments)

The young Yankees fan who lost his autographs [ESPN]
posted to MetaFilter by chavenet at 11:10 AM on May 17, 2022 (13 comments)

Damon Young is a writer, critic, humorist, satirist, and professional Black person. He is also a contributing columnist at the Washington Post, and people send emails to comment on his columns. One of those comments was a complaint about his use of "ain't" and "them white boys". Young was not having it.
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 6:26 AM on April 27, 2022 (59 comments)

The 2022 ballot for the Hugo, Astounding, and Lodestar Awards, awards for achievement in science fiction and fantasy, has been announced. Worldcon members submitted 1368 valid nominating ballots (up from 1249 last year and down from the heights of the 2010s); voting will open in May and the final results will be announced on September 4. Notably, "Unknown Number" by Blue Neustifter a.k.a. Azure Husky (previously) is a story that was originally published as a Twitter thread containing a series of simulated text messages.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:51 AM on April 7, 2022 (37 comments)

Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture "According to a new paper published in the journal Science, {paywalled] an international team of researchers has adapted an ecological "unseen species" model to estimate how many medieval European stories in the chivalric romance or heroic tradition survived and how much has been lost. "
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 9:40 AM on February 23, 2022 (6 comments)

Help me identify this young adult book about time travel of a sort.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:45 PM on December 25, 2007 (3 comments)

"I am a fan of the illustrated posters that used to be the staple of nearly every science fiction and horror film released. These posters are able to communicate so much about a film with a single, masterfully created image that it’s a shame this style isn’t so popular nowadays."
100 Illustrated Horror Film Posters: Part 1 and Part 2
posted to MetaFilter by churl at 10:38 AM on February 2, 2022 (16 comments)

With the recent release of Peter Jackson's documentary The Beatles: Get Back, it's a good time to look at one of the other Liverpool bands of the British Invasion era, one of the few all-female Merseybeat groups (and probably the only one that's been the subject of a musical): The Liverbirds, subject of a (fairly) recent short documentary of their own.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 12:43 PM on November 28, 2021 (13 comments)

Stephen Sondheim was ready to quit Broadway. The failure of Merrily We Roll Along, his first real flop in nearly 20 years, left him cold toward creating more art. Until James Lapine showed him one particular painting, which became a topic of conversation and eventually led to the creation of Sunday In The Park With George. A mammoth work, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Here is the original 1984 Broadway cast of Sunday In The Park With George [2h25m].
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 5:55 AM on November 6, 2021 (19 comments)

You may have heard of Doc Savage, Sexton Blade or Arsene Lupin, but how many other pulp characters do you know from Jess Nevins' Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes, an attempt to document pulp series and heroes from over fifty countries, published between 1902 and 1945. Caution: some of these stories could be very racist indeed.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 11:18 AM on October 7, 2021 (11 comments)

The Honus Wagner T206 is the sports card GOAT, and always will be. It sold recently for $6.6 million. Dan Hajducky and Tisha Thompson at ESPN.com give a short history of baseball card boom and bust and boom.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 4:07 PM on August 16, 2021 (8 comments)

Uber is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). Every bezzle ends.
posted to MetaFilter by panglos at 3:54 PM on August 16, 2021 (109 comments)

No, you can't recycle bowling balls. Bowling balls are made of polyurethane and liquid plasticizer with weighted cores made from polyester resin filled with varying amounts of calcium carbonate, barium sulfate, and glass microspheres.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 4:02 PM on August 16, 2021 (41 comments)

The short-lived 1982 TV series Police Squad!, which parodied M Squad and other cop shows and was eventually reborn as the Naked Gun movies, isn’t officially available for streaming anywhere. It is on this one dude’s YouTube page, though!
A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise) 🚨 Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment) 🚨 The Butler Did It (A Bird In the Hand) 🚨 Revenge And Remorse (The Guilty Alibi) 🚨 Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood) 🚨 Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don’t Laugh)
Dated in spots, but blessedly free of wife murderers.
posted to MetaFilter by Going To Maine at 12:18 PM on July 12, 2021 (107 comments)

Toei Company Ltd of Japan has long been a producer and distributor of anime and tokusatsu programs. While the Western world has seen many of their anime and Super Sentai programs (mostly in the form of Power Rangers), access to many other toku shows has been limited. Shout Factory TV has begun to bring Ultra, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai series to Western streaming services, but now Toei is releasing the first two episodes of more obscure tokusatsu programs in subtitled form on a new channel on YouTube.
posted to MetaFilter by Tchozz at 8:34 AM on June 27, 2021 (8 comments)

Over the course of nine days in 1930, using the pen name Peter Pym, John Steinbeck wrote a pulp detective novel featuring werewolves.
posted to MetaFilter by Iris Gambol at 3:30 PM on June 7, 2021 (38 comments)

Justseeds Artists' Cooperative is a decentralized network of 41 artists committed to social, environmental, and political engagement. They have a huge archive of activist posters that are available for noncommercial use. Topics include the protests against DAPL, the Poor People’s Campaign, antifascism, the Zapatista uprising, and prison abolition.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 10:37 AM on March 12, 2021 (4 comments)

Samuel R. Delany's 1971 film The Orchid is on YouTube. According to K. Leslie Steiner (aka Samuel R. Delany), when it "Primiered [sic] at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago that September (Delany himself was not present), it caused a riot. Outraged fans tried to shout the film off and even pulled down the screen." Sci-fi writer Scott Edelman explains why: "Imagine that you're 16 and collapsed in the film room of an early '70s Phil Seuling Comic-Con, dazed from a day storming the dealers room and attending panels. You're with your friends enjoying Star Trek bloopers and installments of old Captain Marvel serials and maybe even Bambi Meets Godzilla ... when all of a sudden you're staring up at Bernie Wrightson's junk!" And he explains how you can get a much better copy of the film, along with a doc about Delany.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 1:00 PM on September 19, 2013 (44 comments)

"It is truly punk beyond any of the music played by celebrated punk bands at the time of the term’s genesis." Old Skull were a trio of prepubescent boys from Wisconsin whose raw (some would say talentless) thrash punk albums in the late 1980s gained them nationwide attention and a record deal. The band consisted of J.-P. and Jamie Toulon and Jesse Collins-Davies, with a lot of help from the Toulon patriarch Vern. Their songs dealt with issues big ("Homeless," "AIDS") and small ("Pizza Man," "D'Yall Know Where the Herb Is?"). They opened for Sonic Youth and Gwar, they made it onto MTV and into People Magazine. Then their 15 minutes passed. Here's a haunting 2010 WFMU interview with Jamie Toulon when he was a homeless addict in NYC. Then the Toulon brothers died within a year of each other.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 6:26 PM on November 30, 2013 (29 comments)

Sting makes $2,000 a day because Puffy Daddy and his record label didn't bother clearing the rights when they sampled "Every Breath You Take" for "I'll Be Missing You." Even though Andy Summers wrote the guitar line that you hear. It's still a sensitive subject.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 5:34 PM on January 6, 2014 (118 comments)

Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant of Echo and the Bunnymen explain how they came up with "The Killing Moon."
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 8:15 PM on April 7, 2015 (42 comments)

How Snoopy killed Peanuts. "By the end of its run in 1999, Peanuts was an institution. It had become an omnipresent part of American culture, and that’s not a compliment."
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 8:13 PM on August 15, 2015 (120 comments)

"To be a Warrior would mean running all night, every night, through the sweltering summer streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. It would mean showing up for work at six in the evening and not wrapping until the crew could see the sun rise over the East River. It would mean hopping subway turnstiles and enduring the taunts of the local street gangs. The line separating art and life would become blurred, the making of the film an adventure in and of itself." Jackson O'Connor of the Village Voice on the 1979 cult classic "The Warriors."
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:33 PM on September 9, 2015 (35 comments)

Last month, former NHL enforcer Todd Ewen committed suicide. Earlier this year, former NHL enforcer Steve Montador died suddenly after struggling to cope with substance abuse and depression. In 2011, former NHL enforcer Derek Boogard overdosed on alcohol and painkillers, former NHL enforcer Rick Rypien committed suicide, and former NHL enforcer Wade Belak (probably) committed suicide. In 2010, former NHL enforcer Bob Probert died of a heart attack; his brain showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). As of today, the NHL "has 'no desire' to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleges negligence and fraud by the League regarding concussions."
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 12:06 PM on October 1, 2015 (57 comments)

"Under the 'Crime and Safety' section of the site, the tone is much less neighborly. There, residents frequently post unsubstantiated 'suspicious activity' warnings that result in calls to the police on Black citizens who have done nothing wrong."
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 10:28 AM on October 8, 2015 (88 comments)

"Oh Ancient Ocean!/You are nothing!/Vast you may be!/Next to me what are you?/I am beautiful pink and you are stinky green!" In 1980, members of No Wave bands Mars and DNA recorded John Gavanti. An operetta loosely based on Don Giovanni, it's the story of a man with magical powers and a strong libido who gets it on with a lioness and a grandmother "in the beautiful autumn of life," among others. It was recorded in an all-vaccuum-tube-equipment studio that Sonic Youth later used to record 1987's Sister. Glenn Kenny at Trouser Press said "Some have called this the most unlistenable record ever made, and that's a fine invitation indeed." There's a review of sorts here. There's an unreadable fake(?) interview with fans and musicians here.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 5:20 PM on December 4, 2015 (6 comments)

In 2003, a sinkhole opened up at the base of the Temple of the Plumed Serpent in the ruins of Teotihuacán. "In archaeology and anthropology circles—to say nothing of the popular press—Sergio Gómez’s discovery was greeted as a major turning point in Teotihuacán studies. The tunnel under the Temple of the Sun had been largely emptied by looters before archaeologists could get to it in the 1990s. But Gómez’s tunnel had been sealed off for some 1,800 years: Its treasures would be pristine." Here's an update on what they've found.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 8:27 AM on May 20, 2016 (13 comments)

To protest the Vietnam War, I broke into a federal building. Half a century later, I finally got the chance to ask the judge why he made the shocking decision to let me walk.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 9:59 AM on May 24, 2016 (21 comments)

"Founded in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, Morehouse College is one of black America’s crown jewels.... Black America needs Morehouse. America needs Morehouse. But Morehouse is falling down." An in-depth look at the "yearslong slapfight for the steering wheel of one of black America’s most valuable institutions" from Michael Harriot at The Root.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 9:18 AM on March 30, 2017 (8 comments)

Meet Zuul, destroyer of shins--a new ankylosaur. "In the creature’s horned head, she saw the spitting image of Zuul, the Gatekeeper of Gozer—the demonic dog that appeared in Ghostbusters and haunted Sigourney Weaver’s fridge." Also at Smithsonian.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 9:29 AM on May 10, 2017 (30 comments)

"For the first time, a generation of players is playing in low-tops. ... Today's highest-tech, most forward-thinking basketball sneakers don't look like basketball sneakers. And the sneakerheads who love the rich history of the high-top basketball silhouette have had to look beyond the basketball court for inspiration." (sl Esquire)
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 9:26 AM on June 15, 2017 (43 comments)

Because of climate change, there will be less coffee in the future, and it will taste worse and cost more.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 10:55 AM on June 20, 2017 (45 comments)

Kelan Phil Cohran has died. The pioneering jazz musician was a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, a cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a teacher, and the father of lots of equally talented children. Haven’t heard his music and unsure where to start? Here’s a primer from Zaid Mudhaffer, or just jump into this huge Youtube playlist. (previously)
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 9:12 AM on June 30, 2017 (9 comments)

Stevie Salas's research has led to the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, which traces the impact of Native people on America’s rich musical history.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:17 PM on July 19, 2017 (10 comments)

On April 22, 1981, an Ohio teenager named Randy Kobman almost fell to his death at Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium when he flipped over a railing trying to catch a foul ball. Deadspin's Dave McKenna tracked him down recently to get the story of what happened on that day and what he's been up to since his amazing avoidance of death.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:06 PM on August 2, 2017 (25 comments)

"For nearly 60 years, Andrew White has committed John Coltrane’s solos to paper, capturing the saxophone giant’s famously free-flight improvisations in notes that don’t appear on standard jazz sheet music." As of 2015, White had transcribed 840 solos.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 8:52 PM on August 13, 2017 (24 comments)

"I came down on a lightning bolt / nine months in my mama's belly. / When I was born, the midwife scream and shout / I had fire crystals coming out of my mouth. / I'm Exuma, I'm the Obeah Man!" Being an introduction to the unclassifiable Bahamian musician Exuma (1942-1997). Read a Downbeat Magazine profile from shortly after his death, or a slightly less easy on the eyes profile from Perfect Sound Forever. Or listen to some music after the jump.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:23 PM on August 31, 2017 (10 comments)

Stephen Fry hates dancing. "I hate dancing more than I can possibly explain," he explains. Canada-born, Los Angeles-based dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Jo Roy (sorry, autoplay music) performs a spirited terpsichorean response to Fry’s monologue.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:35 AM on September 14, 2017 (29 comments)

A mysterious artist who signed his art "Harvey" painted almost 200 album covers for Savoy Records and its subsidiaries in the 1960s. Most were gospel, but some jazz and blues covers have turned up. Producers at Savoy never knew his identity; they sent concepts to an address in New York, he sent his painting, and they paid him in cash. If you know who Harvey was, please contact site administrators.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:22 AM on October 28, 2017 (12 comments)

The Secret History of Cricket Magazine, the "New Yorker for Children," by A.J. O'Connell at Electric Literature. "In a time when children’s magazines mostly featured hidden object drawings and games, Cricket stubbornly refused to underestimate its young readers. It welcomed their correspondence, and was such a human endeavor that for many readers, finding Cricket in the mailbox every month was like a visit from a friend."
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:57 AM on November 10, 2017 (79 comments)

The Journal of African American Studies devoted its September 2017 issue to Prince. You can read and/or download all the articles at the journal's site.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:47 AM on December 14, 2017 (7 comments)