Best Of MetaFilter

Mount Thorbjorn by D-Stanley (cc by)

We have ongoing updates from Kattullus on what's happening in Grindavík, in the Iceland volcanic eruption thread.

Live updates, silly song parodies, etymology and more. Follow along with Mefites the slow excitement of the Giant container ship stuck in the Suez Canal and the Icelandic volcano

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

Connected by hosszuka (cc by-sa)

Following the news from around the world -- threads worth digging into, as Mefites share their insights on:

- the forthcoming Catalan independence referendum in Spain
- the just-completed election in New Zealand
- the "most ridiculous constitutional crisis" in Australia, and
- the scandal leading to the collapse of the government in Iceland.

Housekeeping! by Eat_Crow (cc by-nd)

Prepare to be amazed and maybe disgusted! MsMolly sparks a roundup of AskMe questions about everyday behaviors that you never knew other people are doing wrong - like shoes on vs. off in the house, and sit vs. stand to wipe.

And in the thread on the snowballing repercussions of the Panama Papers, some reporting direct from our Iceland bureau and some other local news coverage.

Other recent threads on corruption around the world: the Unaoil bribery scandal; Brazil's government-wide meltdown.

Pont en Royans by FrenchHope (cc by)

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

Good luck finding parking: "The Precarious Architecture of 7 European Cliff Cities"

The REMAINS of Greenland project is attempting to locate and preserve archaeological sites in Greenland before they are lost to the destructive effects of climate change

Italians Compare the Arrival of Starbucks to the Apocalypse: pjsky's roundup of the unthinkable

Grace's Guide to British Industrial History is a project publishing the history of industry in the UK and elsewhere

"Being Iceland, it gets complicated": Saga Thing is a podcast about the Sagas of the Icelanders

Roadtrip like it's 1966: 1966 video photolog trips of selected highways via BC Ministry of Transportation

No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end: A short video from the British Geological Survey about Siccar Point