Best Of MetaFilter

Chantal Stevens' fitness planner on The Happy Planner blog

Don't miss divabat's amazing post on planners, planner decoration, and the planner community!

Painting over a mural by WarmSleepy (cc by)

Some interesting ideas and answers in mermaidcafe's Ask Me post looking for examples of erasure in architecture, audio recordings, science, art, and other fields.

Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium by paukrus (cc by)

Some great recent posts on the natural world:

A 17th-Century Woman Artist’s Butterfly Journey: gorgeous images and bio info on early entomologist-artist Maria Sibylla Merian

The inner life of the fig: documentary on the sycamore fig tree, focusing on the intricate mutualism between a fig tree and its fig wasp

A tree grows in Israel: an extinct Judean Date Palm is grown from an ancient jar of seeds unearthed by archaeologists

My hovercraft is full of Petromyzon marinus: science, lore, and more on the fearsome sea lamprey

Satan Put the Kettle On: the mystery of Devil's Kettle Falls' vanishing waterfall

Ramses condom package design

Ramses condoms are named after Ramses II, who had almost 160 children. Condoms are kind of all about preventing lots of kids ... And the Trojans famously let a large object inside their city which discharged a swarm of invaders that destroyed it. Again, isn't this exactly the opposite of what a condom should do? – Sangermaine

Arousing, spacey, spicy and dashing design recently on Mefi: Vintage condom package designs; An extravagant symbol of a man who can’t hide his true nature – A brief history on Spats; Taxi Fabric connects young Indian designers with taxi drivers; When Airlines Looked Cool and Showed It, posters from flying's golden age; In the '70s, NASA commissioned a redesign of their "meatball" logo... unfortunately a lot of NASA engineers hated it. And of course, Mefites weigh in on the Google logo redesign.

and in the Green: Who originated the ubiquitous laser/neon grid design of the '80s?; Cool examples of generative art?; How can I make beautiful Powerpoint Slides?; "The best way I can describe it is 'whimsical'" – Where can I get more plates like this?

Copper engraving from 1755 shows Lisbon in ruins and in flames

Remembrances of things past via recent history posts on the blue:

More than 600 secret societies in the US, documented in 1899: here is "The Cyclopædia of Fraternities"; a compilation of existing authentic information and the results of original investigation

"Count Pier Francesco Orsini was a man much given to melancholy": Orsini's Sacro Busco, or the Park of Monsters

Ghosts at the Banquet: "Martin Gusinde documented the life and rituals of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego ... They had been nearly wiped out by a genocide led by Julius Popper, the Tyrant of Tierra del Fuego"

"In 1986, workers in Sichuan province in China were digging for clay for bricks when they stumbled onto an archaeological treasure: a major site for a Bronze Age civilization previously only guessed at"

Road tripping back in time on the Old Spanish Trail: "Today, you can still find remnants of that road, and there's a group of people who are trying to revive this historic highway."

"after the earthquake, King Joseph I was so afraid of buildings he moved out of Lisbon; his claustrophobia was so severe he lived in tents for the rest of his life. Artists depicted the chaos of the city in the aftermath of the disaster": The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

Laputa: Castle in the Sky / 天空の城ラピュタ（バルス後） by Tatsuya Tanaka

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

World Jollof Rice Day, you say? Jollof rice is a traditional West African dish, but not a humble one

From the Persian for "eyebrow," Ebru (paper marbling) has a long tradition in Turkey

The villagers of Kannauj have inherited a remarkable skill: They can capture the scent of rain

Au Revoir, Mogadishu Vol. 1 — Songs From Before The War: '70s and '80s Somali sound

Since April 20, 2011, Japanese artist Tatsuya Tanaka has created tiny dioramas with common household objects as landscape for tiny people, one every day

Chiara Vigo is the last master of weaving the sea-silk cloth bysso and showcases her art at Museo del Bisso in Sant'Antioco, Sardinia

Expressionistische Tanzstudie Tanzbertchen der Tänzerin Lavinia Schulz

Knowledge of their astonishingly bizarre and tragic art is obscure and largely based on the rediscovery in 1986 of artifacts deposited in a Hamburg museum back in 1925.

The strange story of the 1920s German expressionist mask dancers Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt in Dying for their Art.

Miss Beasley by GW Bush

The subject matter is trite, but entertainingly so, and, to his credit, his portraits of the Scottish Terrier do convey a sort of essential dog-ness.

A real art critic (and MetaFilter member) reviews former President George W. Bush's art.

Famous fantasy author Neil Gaiman recently did a great commencement address at the University of the Arts (embedded above) and it is currently making the rounds. MeFi member Rory Marinich was in the audience and recounts the experience:

As great as I'm sure this speech is as standalone inspiration, for our graduating class everything Neil said really struck home. Art school is a weirdly draining and exhausting place, and I think that caught a lot of us off guard – definitely me; I'm just getting over a panic attack that hit in waves over the course of a very rough last week. The weirdness isn't that it's exhausting (I'm sure all colleges are like that), but that it comes from the same thing that also makes art school exhilarating: the freedom you have to pursue your own creative path, to be as strange and as personal as you can bear being.

swiss re art by phogel (cc by)

In a thread about the odd new Swiss/US dual-citizenship of Michele Bachmann, MeFi member The 10th Regiment of Foot tells the tale of being "a 12 year old Alabama dirt child" given French lessons from a former Swiss spy.

There she would have some sort of cultural lesson, usually centering around her incredible collection of antique goods pilfered from war-torn Europe (and why not turnabout is fair play, non?). She'd have laid out on her horsehair divan a spectacular tapestry, ceramic, or other artwork and we'd discuss its provenance and the story behind the person depicted.

detail of revikim's drawing

MeFi member revikim made this beautiful design using nothing but ink pens over six days of work, posted it to Projects and it ended up on MetaFilter. Stunning work while also being hard to imagine the hours that went into producing it.