Best Of MetaFilter

image via Miss T.Horn

My great-uncle was in a cell in the French Resistance during WWII ... An intriguing question about a 50-year old mystery photo location from Miss T.Horn, and a fabulous answer 37 minutes later by essexjan.

Goat by bagsgroove (cc by)

Do you have pictures of goats you would let me use for gifts??

In today's edition of "what does eponysterical mean?" malevolent lives up to his user name.

Photo by Wendy Laurel at Lomography Magazine

Film soup is an experimental analog photography technique where you soak a roll of film in different liquids to add fun, crazy colors and effects: oulipian's post Recipes for Rainbows from last month.

Via Buzzfeed, Photos Of How People Celebrated Juneteenth 100 Years Ago.

Dorothea Lange self portrait

Dorothea Lange digital archive 📷 New Jersey: Images of the Garden State 📷 Streetview of 1940s NYC 📷 Inspiring Incarcerated Individuals to Visualize Their Dreams in Photos 📷 Ingrid Pollard: pastoral interlude

Come join our April non-fools day Indoor Scavenger Hunt! Can you find all the things? Post a photo or poem etc of your finds, and suggest things for people to seek.

Refreshable braille display by Sebastien.delorme - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 from wikimedia.org

Hippybear posted a very helpful link on how to write image descriptions in Twitter for people with vision impairment or low vision!

John Margolies photo via publicdomainreview.org

Great post by zamboni about John Margolies’ photographs of roadside America

Malta 08-09-2006 17.00.44 by Heini Samuelsen (cc by-sa)

Members look back over their AskMe questions, reminding us things can get better over time

Photo quiz: Can you find the cat hiding in plain sight?

Grooming confessions: How and where do Mefites cut our toenails?

Can't transport enough fuel to your remote mining site? With 19th century ingenuity you can run your industrial equipment all on water power.

Falconetti says, "I was just on Jeopardy! a week and a half ago..."

Are salt grinders any good? furnace.heart answers, as a person who used to work in a retail salt store

mitred noro blanket by Alex "Skud" Bayley (cc by)

I need a new delightfully tedious hobby!

Can you help with this mystery photo of 1860s woman?

Live video translation by a random person, and telecom in the Faroe Islands

"Out of Nowhere" by Ray Kelly

So MANY great photo posts this month: a rare view of Victorian Women of Color; "Through Our Eyes" asked 100 homeless people in Spartanburg, South Carolina to take pictures of their lives; Vintage aerial photos of rural America; Was Diane Arbus the Most Radical Photographer of the 20th Century?; Six degrees of Copenhagen by Jens Juul; WaterWigs project by Tim Tadder; Restricted Areas series by Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko; freaky and cute Secret Friends; photographs by Degas; using drones to portray scenes of inequality in South Africa; Famous landmarks photographed from the "wrong" direction.

inside elevation by parramitta (cc by)

Why does Wyoming have such a low population compared to neighboring states? barchan explains, jeb adds: "everything in the West comes back to water".

Ever wonder what a "nor'easter" is? Check out the great answers from Seymour Zamboni, plastic_animals, and weathergal in rules of thumb for weather patterns in the USA.

Lots of different places have unique colloquial weather terms too. (Gullywashers, the foxes' wedding, and lots of wind terms again from barchan.)

Also in language surveys: What are some antiquated place nicknames (like the Borscht Belt)? What do other languages call it when your foot "falls asleep"?

Different cultures also have their own languages of flower-meanings. Plus some cool info from sukeban on how new imported flowers like roses made their way into kimono designs in the late 19th century.

For geography/history detectives: How can I tell, just from clues in the document itself, when a world map was made or figure out when a photograph was taken?

Did you see the new photos from the formerly-hidden-from-visitors North Korean subway system?

Some great answers in travel threads recently: Italy: non-traditional but amazing?, and also Scotland: what not to miss.

Kozyndan Nakano In Spring detail

Recently on Mefi, people and places around the world, enchanting, mysterious and magnetic:

The Banjo Bands of Malawi is a video clip featuring three different performances of a certain strain of folk music from the small African nation.
______

From the 1920s to the 1960s, German people loved to pose with actors dressed as polar bears.
______

LA-based art duo kozyndan posted an immersive "VR" experience of their 2009 Miyazaki-esque piece "Nakano In Spring".

"Wow, I love a lot of these. But as I was going through the reddit thread, I came across this picture. It isn't the most stunning example of colorization, but it was striking to me nonetheless. The person in the photo is my great uncle, Raymond Bowman..."

milkcrateman recognizes a relative.