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!
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)
“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.”
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.
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.
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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.
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:
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.
“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.
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:
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?
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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