Best Of MetaFilter

honour the immigrant by byronv2 (cc by-nc)

I'm a trustee of the (tiny) BritCits campaign group and charity which works on behalf of divided families, includes spouses, civil partners, parents and children, elderly dependants etc.

Plep comments to add context, further info and lots of links in the UK Thomas Podgoretsky deportation case post: 1, 2, 3

A couple weeks ago, we said we're hiring; now, we've hired! Long-time contributor and community member Eyebrows McGee will be joining the MetaFilter moderation team starting in the new year.

BEWARE of DOG by kennymatic (cc by)

You can mark houses visited/not-visited -- were they not visited because nobody was home? Scary dog? (literally has a spot for "scary dog, can't go to door") Do the same people still live there? Is the house on the market? Does the house have a foreclosure notice? It highlights if someone in the house has turned 18 since the last election -- do they still live there? Are they registered to vote?

Eyebrows McGee offers some first-hand insights on how the NGP VAN database works for candidates and and campaign workers.

Almost Time by MikeSpeaks (cc by)

Need to talk about the new Star Wars? Fanfare's got you covered, including Mefi's own adrianhon checking in from a panel discussion with the cast.

If you've been brushing up on the original films to prepare, you might enjoy the Fanfare rewatches of all the previous Star Wars movies.

For more, check out the posts tagged 'StarWars' including fun odds and ends like Star Wars, the pencil game and real fencers doing light saber battle.

Star Wars art? Scenes made of Lego, and some paintings in classical Japanese style

Nerdy analytic overthinking? The economics of the Death Star and the legal case of Han vs. Greedo. Ask those hard questions like are the Jedi overrated? and of course is Jar Jar the big boss?

'They made me wear my bathrobe' [screen capture from video via hlntv.com]

Now is the time when I am typing. I am typing on my computer doing internet things. Isn't this interesting? Cool internet things. I solved a puzzle and now people are taking pictures of me pretending to solve a puzzle. – harperpitt

JannaK reports that the HLN network has produced a short video episode featuring the Ask Metafilter post requesting help with her late grandmother's coded messages, and "the true hero of this story: Metafilter's own harperpitt, her code-breaking skills, and the power of the hive mind in tackling web mysteries."

(Post title text grabbed from littlesq!)

What happened when someone in the Middle Ages got pink eye, or someone in Elizabethan England got athlete's foot or crotch rot? Did the infections just hang around forever? Was everyone just infected with this type of stuff? (It's pretty well-known that basically everyone had lice and fleas, I believe.)

In Ask Me: Minor infections in the days before anti-biotics or anti-fungals? Many good answers, and Jane the Brown brings the serious history again.

Exciting news: we're looking to hire an additional part-time moderator to join the MetaFilter team. If you're a site member with a cool head and an interest in community management, take a look at the job listing and consider submitting an application.

For more info and general discussion, drop by the MetaTalk thread about the announcement.

17th Century commonplace book via themillions.com

Before Jezebel, The Toast, and Twitter there were wise and witty women handily perpetrating "epic feminist takedowns of the ages," as illustrated in yarntheory's interesting post about Mary Collier and her 18th century poem, "The Woman's Labour"

... and before Pinterest and Evernote and Tumblr, "there was the humble commonplace book, a space for gathering and reflecting on ideas, quotations, observations, lines from poems, and other information." MonkeyToes gives us a loving magpie's roundup of this "venerable tradition of idea curation."

Doing some holiday shopping? You can support MetaFilter while you do it in a couple of ways:

1. Buy stuff made by members of the MetaFilter community, at the MeFi Mall. Crafty MeFites have got a bunch of neat stuff available!

2. Getting stuff from Amazon? Visit via our referrer link to let MetaFilter get a little bit of credit for the shopping you were going to do anyway.

For more details, you can check out this MetaTalk thread.

This month on MetaFilter's Best Of The Web podcast, cortex and jessamyn's special guest is each other as they pull a dynamic duo all by their collective lonesomes and talk about everything from MeFites' projects about inclusive sex ed and magic realism twitter bots to posts about maps and questions about navigating people's reactions to changing your appearance.