To read later
Give Me Something to Read selects the best long form essays and articles from 2010. I’ve read a few of these, but not as many as I would have guessed. (via waxy)
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Tyler Cowen’s book picks for 2010
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen picks some of his favorite books of the year. Cowen has never steered me wrong with a book recommendation (even in recommending his own books). Of the most interest to me this year are Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (which I’ve seen rave reviews for all over the place) and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.
Five best movie villains of the 2000s
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is on the list…click through for the rest. (via @tcarmody)
100 great movie moments
A collection by Roger Ebert from 1995. The moments include:
Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta discuss what they call Quarter Pounders in France, in “Pulp Fiction.”
Jack Nicholson trying to order a chicken salad sandwich in “Five Easy Pieces.”
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” dialogue by Robert Duvall, in “Apocalypse Now.”
Best magazine covers
Vote for your favorite magazine cover from the past year. Lots of nice work in there.
Top ten lost technologies
The list includes Roman concrete, Damascus steel, and a napalm-like weapon called Greek fire. (via @ebertchicago)
Top ten typefaces of the 2000s
A list of the most important typefaces of the last decade.
It is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been “important” for one reason or another. However, I am not going to provide my reasons. Instead, I am going to let the readers of this blog see if they can figure out the contribution that each of these ten faces makes.
Comedy MVPs
Bill Simmons recently compiled a list of the MVPs of comedy from 1975 to the present. Here’s a portion of the list:
1989: Dana Carvey
1990: Billy Crystal
1991: Jerry Seinfeld
1992: Jerry Seinfeld, Mike Myers (tie)
1993: Mike Myers
1994: Jim Carrey
1995: Chris Farley
1996: Chris Rock
Unlikely Words has the full list and you can go to Simmons’ site to read the list with annotations. Such as:
1982-84: Eddie Murphy
The best three-year run anyone has had. Like Bird’s three straight MVPs. And by the way, “Beverly Hills Cop” is still the No. 1 comedy of all time if you use adjusted gross numbers.
The best magazine articles
Kevin Kelly is compiling a list of really good magazine articles. Lots of good Instapaper chum there already.
Best sites for film criticism
An annotated list of the best film criticism blogs. (via the house next door)
Woody Allen’s six favorite Woody Allen films
They are: Purple Rose of Cairo, Match Point, Bullets Over Broadway, Zelig, Husbands and Wives, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. As Ebert said, “wrong”.
100 greatest movie insults
Pretty good…except that they forgot Corky St. Clair’s “I hate you and I hate your ass face” from Waiting for Guffman.
Architecture’s most important buildings
From a panel of 52 experts surveyed by Vanity Fair, a list of the 21 most important works of architecture created since 1980. The top three:
1. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao
2. Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection in Houston
3. Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland
Here are the complete results of the survey.
The best bad first lines of 2010
The winners of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced.
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.
The winner is a little too obviously horrible for my taste, but I did like the runner-up in the detective category:
As Holmes, who had a nose for danger, quietly fingered the bloody knife and eyed the various body parts strewn along the dark, deserted highway, he placed his ear to the ground and, with his heart in his throat, silently mouthed to his companion, “Arm yourself, Watson, there is an evil hand afoot ahead.
Heady stuff.
Time’s best blogs of 2010
On the list are kottke.org favorites like Hilobrow, The Sartorialist, Shorpy, The Awl, and Roger Ebert’s Journal.
The worst movies never made
A list of ten movies that weren’t made…and a good thing they weren’t. Including a Lord of the Rings adaptation with The Beatles.
According to Roy Carr’s The Beatles at the Movies, talks were once in the works for a Beatle-zation — with John Lennon wanting to play Gollum, Paul McCartney Frodo, George Harrison Gandalf, and Ringo Starr Sam. Collaborating with director John Boorman, screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg thought the Beatles should play the four hobbits (and agreed with McCartney that he would be the ideal Frodo).
The 101 best sandwiches in NYC
I’ve only had a few of these…I am clearly not exercising my sandwich muscles enough these days. (Although the Brazilian sandwich at Project Sandwich has been treating me well lately.)
The 50 Greatest Hip Hop Samples Of All Time
This breaks a few of the rules on my list of Rules for Lists, but I’m a sucker for hip hop samples.
(via waxy)
The Best Missed Dunk of All Time
Shannon Brown of the LA Lakers missed a dunk in spectacular fashion last night.
This Vince Carter dunk wasn’t from as far away, but it did go in.
2009 book sales figures
In fiction, Dan Brown was #1 but James Patterson appears *five times* in the top 25. On the nonfiction side, a certain former Alaskan governor (no, not Walter J. Hickel) tops the list. The full list is here. (via the millions)
When programming errors attack!
From a bunch of security experts, the top 25 most dangerous programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities.
Cross-site scripting and SQL injection are the 1-2 punch of security weaknesses in 2010. Even when a software package doesn’t primarily run on the web, there’s a good chance that it has a web-based management interface or HTML-based output formats that allow cross-site scripting. For data-rich software applications, SQL injection is the means to steal the keys to the kingdom. The classic buffer overflow comes in third, while more complex buffer overflow variants are sprinkled in the rest of the Top 25.
And the record goes to…
From The Big Picture, a bunch of photos of record setters. This girl has the world’s largest (non-virtual) Pokemon collection.
And the contenders for the silliest record are:
The Most Number of Dishes On Display, In a Single Day
The Largest Cycling Class
The Biggest Plate of Hummus
The Most People Running Dressed as Santa
The Largest Meatball
But I have to admit, this is almost poetic in its neat summary of the modern condition:
Sultan Kosen, the world’s tallest man, unveils the world’s largest gingerbread man at an Ikea store in Oslo.
The top 10 shots of 2009
This is one of my favorite end of the year lists: the top ten shots in movies (part one, part two). (via fimoculous)
Ebert’s favorite films of the 2000s
Even though it’s on The Naughtie List, I missed Roger Ebert’s list of the best films of the decade. It’s an interesting list; several items on there that you didn’t see on a lot of other lists.
Best extended movie takes
Mike Le has collected 20 great extended takes from a variety of movies, including no-brainers like The Shining and The Player but also some you may not have noticed before. (via @sippey)
For the weekend
If you didn’t get a chance to check this out earlier in the week, a friendly reminder: my 100 favorite links of 2009, culled from the archives of kottke.org. Good for killing several hours.
100 things we didn’t know last year for 2009
One of my favorite end-of-the-year lists: the BBC’s 100 things we didn’t know last year. For instance, the English Channel froze from Dover to Calais in 1673. Thanks, Little Ice Age.
The 100 best links of 2009
For each of the past six years, I’ve collected my favorite stuff posted to kottke.org into a “best links of the year” list. 2009’s list — the original 100 kottke.org posts containing those links, in random order — covers such topics as healthcare spending, Amish hackers, gaussian goats, surfing videos, fun Flash games, Pete Campbell dancing, Rwandan genocide, and something called the McGangBang, as well as the usual array of dazzling video, photos, and art featured on kottke.org in the past year. Kiss the rest of your day goodbye!
Past best-of lists: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004.
P.S. kottke.org’s Person of the Year: Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III.
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