Best Of MetaFilter

Memory by kevin dooley (cc by)

Remembering, Forgetting, Remembering, Forgetting, Remembering, Forgetting, Remembering

Cooking & Eating by ☼☼Jo Zimny Photos☼☼ (cc by-nc-nd)

A digest of recent food culture posts on Mefi:

The Food Timeline, evolution of foods dating back to before 17,000BC ⏳; Maria Orosa, Filipina food technologist, chemist, humanitarian, war hero 👩🏽‍🔬; The D.C. Region Doesn’t Have Full-Time Food Critics of Color. Why That Matters 📰; Archeology of Taste is a project about childhood memories 🍭; Consider the potato: How do you prefer yours? 🥔; The Food Flow Model, a web of connections across the continental U.S. 🚚; What Makes Good Comfort Food? A LitHub conversation 🍝; The most taxing work in the kitchen is brain work 🧠Iceland’s last McDonald’s burger simply won’t rot, even after 10 years 🍔.

IMG_1697 by FrancescaV.com (cc by)

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

40 years of Shenzhen, from market village to SEZ

Breaking the Ice, rare Icelandic funk- and soul-inspired music

Central Station, stories from cattle stations in the Australian outback

Georgia Has a Coast? Photos by drone of the Georgia coast that fills his soul

Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran: looking at the lives of women during the Qajar dynasty (1796-1925)

La Scarzuola: deep in Italy, one man’s surrealist mini-city sleeps

Arundhati Roy on the politics of language and translation in India

Beyond 'Florida Man': The problem with writing about Florida

Figures In The Stars: comparing 28 different sky cultures

Loose Meat by FotoEdge

What's an obscure food specialty of your local area, that nobody from outside your area's ever heard of?

What's a comedy or music act, famous in your area, that nobody from outside your area's ever heard of?

Concurs de castells Tarragona 2008 68 by fer55. (cc by-sa)

Amazing pictures of the traditional Catalonian human towers called castells. Mefites share more background:

samelborp reports in from Catalonia: "... I went to the plaça de la vila (town's main square) to see them perform. One thing is to watch it in TV, but when you are there you realize what it takes to build those inmense human towers, the huge amount of people and how they arrange themselves..."

fuzz follows castelling too: "[Catalan tv] covers the Castellers every week as though it were a major sporting event. [...] it's amazing how the competition has intensified ... An 8-level castell was impressive a few years back; this time I got to see two successful 10-level towers."

In a 2005 thread, shoepal told how "I actually participated in a castelling (practice) event on a hot autumn afternoon in a small town outside of Barcelona. I was part of the base of the castle and had folks walking on my shoulders towards the center."

...and benzo8 on being a regular casteller: "us guys at the bottom may well have ten people directly on our shoulders, and maybe fifty-sixty people above us in total!"

dance by bambe1964 (cc by-nd)

Put your dancing shoes on and take a trip around the world, in gusandrews's fascinating comment on the myriad ways social dance changes and spreads.

Doroteo Arango II reflects on one night at a famous dance club in London. "In 2002 I made a literal last minute decision, standing at the check-in line at the airport after a visit to my sister, to stay in London and see how long and how far I could make it with 100 pounds and basic English..."

Did you catch the incredible historical find, re-created Afro-Caribbean dance music from the 1600s?

What are some of your favorite transcendent, gives-you-chills performances? (And how about most amazing heart-in-your-throat sports moments?)

Conspire describes how this dancer's sign-language performance modifies lyrics and mixes languages to better serve the intended viewer.

Reflections, windows, mirror by Mind on Fire Photography (cc by-sa)

Tornado sirens, weird traffic signals, and more... What are some locally-normal things unique to your home area, that you thought were universal 'til you left home?

fraula and others describe food culture in France

beagle explains some of the appeal of Dutch carbide shooting - "perhaps the pinnacle of cultural achievement in a nation of soccer-playing, bicycle-riding dairy farmers with long winter nights"

Want to be recognized as an independent nation-state? First, get a national football (soccer) team -- diplomacy by sport in occupied Western Sahara.

"Even outlaws have to grow old" -- the story of a legendary Florida marijuana bust in 1973

Take it from a tv person, these two reporters "are the gold standard of TV news feature journalists." -- Minnesota stories

Get to know tiny Hans island, center of a genteel Canada vs. Denmark conflict -- with booze.

Harvesting Palm Sugar by edbrambley (cc by-sa)

Join Mefites for a deep dive on some arts and culture from outside the west:

Catchy song and an intro to Kriol language and culture from an Indigenous Australian singer

A new movie provides a window into the unique culture, language, and politics of multigenerational Tamil-Malaysians

Classic short story from "one of Bengal's greatest writers"

Men's fashion from a prizewinning Indian designer

Regional politics, arts and music from Sudanese and South Sudanese journalists

David Bowie is crossing the border by mrpstr (cc by-sa)

If you're mourning the Starman or the Goblin King, you're not alone. Come join Mefi's David Bowie wake, a thread full of good links and stories and meditations on what he meant to us.

This video is about everyone in the world who isn’t Phil Fish.

It turns out the great video, "This is Phil Fish" posted by jklaiho was created by "Mefi's own" Peevish. (The transcript has been posted here.)

An astute observation from MeFi member JimmyJames:

Next time people ask why sociology is important, I'm going to show them this video.

On its own, when you see one person slip, you automatically assume that person slipped, was clumsy or not playing attention. But when you look at the aggregate, you realize that the failure isn't on the individual at all, rather the structures that cause certain people to fail with almost no fault of their own. And yet, without this data, they will very quickly ascribe the mistake to themselves.