Best blogs of ‘09

Worth checking out: Rex Sorgatz’s list of the 30 best blogs of 2009.

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Waiting for 2010

The AV Club lists 32 entertainments (books, movies, TV) they are most anticipating in 2010. (thx, judd)

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Top Vimeo videos of 2009

From Vimeo’s list of favorite videos of 2009, the music video for Luv Deluxe by Cinnamon Chasers:

Also worth watching is the Tarantino Mixtape, which hovers somewhere between an analysis of the themes in QuentinTarantino’s films and a toe-tapping remix of all the great music, visuals, and sounds he uses in them. (via @brainpicker)

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Best stories of the past 4.5 billion years

Now that it’s the end of 2009, The Onion is taking the opportunity to present their top ten stories of the past 4.5 billions years. #5 is Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World:

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

I also like The Ones We Lost:

Some of the world’s most beloved people have died over the past 4.5 billion years. Here are a few…

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World-changing music

To ponder over the weekend: twenty pieces of music that changed the world. #11 on the list is Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. (via @bobulate)

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Lines that defined the decade

Jenni, I don’t want to step on your toes here, but I’m hoping that Scott Lamb’s excellent One-Liners of the Decade — from “Wassap!” to “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” to “I drink your milkshake” — ends up on the Noughtie List.

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Best media errors and corrections of 2009

Regret the Error presents its annual list of media errors and corrections. These are two of my favorites:

An article on Aug. 2 about older alumni who have been helped by university career counselors referred imprecisely to comments by a 1990 graduate of Lehigh University who lost his job in February when his company was downsized, and a correction in this space last Sunday misspelled his surname. As the article correctly noted, he is David Monson, not Munson, and he was speaking generally — not about himself — when he said that newly unemployed people sometimes mope around the house in sweatpants.

—

ON 17 July 2008 in our front page article “Ron the Lash” we falsely reported that whilst recovering from an operation to his ankle Cristiano Ronaldo had “gone on a bender” at a Hollywood nightclub where he splashed out pounds 10,000 on champagne and vodka and threw his crutches to the ground and tried to dance on his uninjured foot. We now accept that Cristiano did not “go on a bender”, did not drink any alcohol that evening, did not spend pounds 10,000 on alcohol, nor throw his crutches to the floor or try to dance.

(via df)

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Top 10 astronomy photos of 2009

One of the better lists out there: the top astronomy photos of the year. From the list, this is a more detailed view of the Martian landscape than we’re used to seeing:

My personal favorite, the photos taken by the LRO of Apollo 11’s landing site, made the list as well.

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Most exciting film scripts of 2009

The Black List is the collection of scripts that got movie executives most excited in 2009. Here’s #1:

1. The Muppet Man By Christopher Weekes
What it’s about: The life and times of the late Jim Henson, the man behind Sesame Street and The Muppets.

What it’s like: The Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, but with puppets. This moving story depicts the life of a creative genius, with occasional surreal appearances by the likes of Kermit and Miss Piggy.

(via subtraction)

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2009’s best new blogs

Bygone Bureau asks a bunch of folks: what was your favorite new blog of 2009?

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The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009

One of my favorite end-of-the-year lists is Foreign Policy’s The Top Ten Stories You Missed; here’s this year’s installment. A Hotline for China and India caught my eye.

“Hotlines” between world leaders, like the legendary Moscow-Washington “red telephone” devised after the Cuban missile crisis, are designed to prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications between nuclear powers from escalating into a nuclear conflict. China and the United States have one. So do India and Pakistan. This year, the leaders of India and China agreed to set one up between New Delhi and Beijing, highlighting concerns that a worsening border dispute could quickly become the first major conflict of the multipolar era.

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The year in ideas, 2009

The NY Times Magazine has published their Year in Ideas issue for 2009. Lots of good stuff in there. Before I got sidetracked with family obligations (Minna!), I planned on pitching the magazine’s editors a couple of ideas I noticed this year:

The Neverending Wake. We got a preview of what death in the celebrity age (more) is going be like when a cluster of notable people passed away this summer. How will we think about death when someone we know or admire dies every day for the rest of our lives?

Machine Gun Photography. Just as the introduction of the machine gun fundamentally changed warfare, so the affordable high-resolution digital video camera will change photography. Now you don’t have to wait for exactly the right moment for the perfect shot; just take 10 minutes of HD video and find the best shots later. Photography was always really about the editing anyway, right?

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Big but never number one

From Box Office Mojo, a list of the top grossing movies in the US that were never #1 at the box office. Topping the list is the sleeper hit of sleeper hits, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

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Paste Magazine’s best of the decade

They’ve got lists for books, movies, documentaries, video games, memes, comedians, and more.

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Top movies of the 2000s

From The Times in the UK, the top 100 films of the decade. Before you look, see if you can figure out which one of the following is not in the top 5:

Grizzly Man
Cache
No Country for Old Men
Team America: World Police
There Will Be Blood

I’ve seen 58 out of the 100.

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Criterion Collection missteps

Vice has a list of the ten most dubious films included in the Criterion Collection…they call them little fuck-ups.

3. The Rock - Director Michael Bay, 1996
Ugh. That’s right. I failed to mention up top that there are not one, but two Michael Bay films in the Criterion Collection. It’s the kind of shock-inducing information you need delivered in increments. If they wanted to include an Alcatraz movie, uh, why not Escape from Alcatraz? Perhaps Criterion felt they needed a couple of signature “explosion” films to represent the genre. But given that logic, why not throw in Every Which Way but Loose to represent the “truck driver with an orangutan sidekick” genre too?

Also, Michael Bay is doing a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds? What? WHAT??

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Best music of the 2000s

From Largehearted Boy, a roundup of lists of best music of the 2000s.

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Music videos of the decade

Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)

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The best of Worldchanging

If you haven’t had occasion to dip into the Worldchanging site, they’ve compiled a list of their favorite/best/most popular articles from the past on the occasion of their sixth anniversary.

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Best NBA players of the 2000s

I’m not exactly sure what I expected from such a list, but this wasn’t quite it. Kobe at #3 and Shaq is #6? Hrm.

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The top 200 albums of the 2000s

Pitchfork continues their look back at the 2000s with the top 200 albums of the decade. Here are the top 20.

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The best movies of 2009

Too soon for that title? Anyway, Hitfix takes an early look at the Oscar contenders for 2010. Among them, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Star Trek, Where the Wild Things Are, Malick’s The Tree of Life, The Road, Amelia, and The Lovely Bones.

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Where’s the world’s best food?

The Guardian lists the best 50 foods to eat and where to get them. I’ve had a few of these (ravioli at Babbo, pork at Gramercy, pho at Pho 24, pastrami at Katz’s, etc.) but, sucker that I am for such things, I particularly enjoyed reading about the Turkish olive oil available at an electrical supply shop in London:

At his electrical supply shop in London’s Clerkenwell, Mehmet Murat sells wonderful, intensely fruity oil from his family’s olive groves in Cyprus and south-west Turkey. Now he imports more than a 1,000 litres per year. His lemon-flavoured oil is good enough to drink on its own.

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Astronomy Photographer of the Year winners

The Royal Observatory has announced the winners of its Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest.

I had no idea that images this sharp and detailed could be taken with non-pro ground telescopes…particularly these shots of the Horsehead Nebula and the surface of the Moon. More winners listed here.

Update: Jonathan Crowe notes that the gear used to take these photos isn’t cheap.

The winner’s photo of the Horsehead Nebula (mpastro2001 also had a second photo in the top five) used a 12 1/2” Ritchey-Chretien telescope ($21,500) and an SBIG STL11000 camera ($7,195 and up) with an AO-L adaptive optics accessory ($1,795) on a Paramount ME mount ($14,500). Total cost for just the equipment mentioned here: $44,990.

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Who won the recession?

Vanity Fair has released their 2009 list of the “top 100 Information Age powers”…Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and the Google triumvirate make up the top five. Only 12 women made the list, most of them coupled with a man. A similar list from Business Insider has a better name: The 25 Who Won the Recession. I thought this recession business was supposed to kill the influence of the financial sector…funny how that never happens.

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Pitchfork’s songs of the decade

As part of their review of the music of the 2000s, Pitchfork listed the top 500 tracks of the past decade. Here are the top 10:

10. Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
9. Animal Collective, “My Girls”
8. Radiohead, “Idioteque”
7. Missy Elliott, “Get Ur Freak On”
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
5. Daft Punk, “One More Time”
4. Beyonce [ft. Jay-Z], “Crazy in Love”
3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy], “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”
2. LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
1. OutKast, “B.O.B.”

Be sure to click through for the extensive explanations. It would easy to nitpick specific selections, but that’s a pretty good top 10.

Gorilla vs. Bear also shared their top songs and albums of the decade.

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The world’s worst healthcare reforms

Foreign Policy has a list of the worst healthcare reforms in the world…the list includes China, Russia, the United States, and Turkmenistan.

So, in a frankly insane healthcare reform effort, [Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov] restricted the public’s access to care by replacing up to 15,000 doctors and nurses with unqualified military conscripts. The next year, he ordered hospitals and clinics outside of the capital, Ashgabat, to close — even though the vast proportion of Turkmenistan’s population lives in rural areas. The BBC quoted him as saying, “Why do we need such hospitals? If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat.” He also implemented fees and created an “unofficial” ban on the diagnosis of certain communicable diseases, like hepatitis.

(via mr)

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Quentin Tarantino’s top 20 movies

Quentin Tarantino talks about his 20 favorite movies that have been made since he became a director.

Here’s the full list in handy text form:

Battle Royale
Anything Else
Audition
Blade
Boogie Nights
Dazed & Confused
Dogville
Fight Club
Fridays
The Host
The Insider
Joint Security Area
Lost In Translation
The Matrix
Memories of Murder
Police Story 3
Shaun of the Dead
Speed
Team America
Unbreakable

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Some of my favorite books

The Week asked me to choose a selection of my favorite books for this week’s issue. I’ll take any opportunity to recommend Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet.

Even though it’s a history of the telegraph, this book is always relevant. The rise of the 1830s communication device continues to be a fantastic metaphor for each new Internet technology that comes along, from e-mail to IM to Facebook to Twitter.

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50 essential films

Roger Ebert annotates the top 10 from The Spectator’s list of 50 Essential Films.

1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L’avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L’atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks

Lots of notable titles missing…and only a couple post-1980s films make the list.

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