kottke.org posts about lists
The Onion AV Club tracks which films and directors have had the most influence on Wes Anderson, including The Graduate, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francois Truffaut.
The “uniforms” he outfits his characters in are like a variation on Charlie Brown’s zigzag shirt and Lucy’s blue dress, and there’s an atmosphere of wistful melancholy common to Peanuts cartoons and Anderson’s seriocomedies. A Boy Named Charlie Brown echoes Anderson’s persistent “sic transit gloria” theme, as Charlie Brown blazes through the rounds of a local spelling bee, then washes out at the nationals. When he returns home to a group of friends who accept him as much as they mock him, he might as well be walking in slow motion, while “Ooh La La” plays on the soundtrack.
And today they’re going to run a list of films which were influenced by Anderson…I’ll have that link a bit later.
A list of 15 of the top small workplaces of 2007. If you run a small company, there are lot of good examples to follow here.
The line of succession to the British Throne, which has on it 1286 members. AKA, the thing you should show someone should they ask you the definition of “thorough”.
Is lazy reporting hurting the visual arts? Jonathan Jones argues that almost all reporting about art takes one of six forms: expensive art, graffiti, plagiarism, earth-shattering discoveries, and restoration. Looking back through kottke.org’s art tag page, I am guilty of linking to stories of all those types. Eep.
Without the associated covers, this list of the AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers winners for “outstanding book and book cover design produced in 2006” is pretty useless. (Anyone want to track all of these covers down? I’ll host (or link to) the results on kottke.org.)
Update: Photos of the covers and books are all available on the AIGA Design Archives site. No permalink tho. :( (thx, tbit)
The Guardian has been collecting the best interviews from the past century. Interviewees include John Lennon, Marlon Brando, Adolf Hitler, and Marilyn Monroe. An impressive trove.
A subjective list — is there any other kind? — of the top 10 issues of McSweeney’s magazine.
The Guardian has an extensive list of writers and the rooms in which they write (with photos and descriptions by the authors). For whatever reason, I became very interested in writers’ rooms after reading Witold Rybczynski’s The Most Beautiful House in the World, in which he describes several rooms built by writers specifically for working in, including one author who built a completely separate room apart from his house which combined his need for solitude with a short commute. (thx, youngna)
Twelve essential photographic facts, formulas, and rules of thumb.
Anatomical gray card. Metering off an 18-percent neutral gray card is a good way to get a midtone reading that will give you a good overall exposure of a scene. Forgot your gray card? Hold your open hand up so it’s facing the light, take a reading off your palm, open up one stop, and shoot. (Various skin tones rarely account for even a full-stop difference.)
It seems as though the only people who put out manifestos these days are designers and serial killers. 50 manifestos from such designers as Zaha Hadid, Stefan Sagmeister, Rem Koolhaas, and John Maeda.
The top 100 greatest beatdowns in history, most of them related to sports. #1 is Secretariat’s 31-length victory at Belmont, the footage of which is well worth a look if you haven’t seen it. That horse so totally pours it on down the stretch that it gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. (thx, david)
A brief history of programming languages from the September 1995 issue of Byte magazine. Amazing how many of these languages are now extinct or otherwise not widely used…and that Perl, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. didn’t make the list.
Update: I corrected the above statement about Perl et. al. not existing and modified it to read that they didn’t make the list. Perl, Ruby, nd Java all existed in one form or another in 1995. (thx to everyone who sent this in)
Top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills, including Cobol, PowerBuilder, and cc:Mail. “A rough translation of OS/2 could be ‘wrong horse.’”
100 blogs they love so much that they’re not going to link to a single one.
Update: Several people pointed out that the original list is available with links at PC World. Of course, it’s a pageview-pumping multiple page situation, so you’ll want the print version instead. (Yes, this is me punching a gift horse in the mouth, or whatever that expression is.)
The American Film Institute has refreshed their list of the top 100 movies…here’s a listing comparing the new list with the one from 1998. Godfather Part II at #32 is still a travesty.
Update: Roger Ebert weighs in on the list.
Hot 100 women chosen by lesbians. A nice counterpoint to similar lists from Maxim and People.
The 2007 MacTech 25 “honors the most influential people in the Macintosh community”. Includes a single woman.
Top 20 plays of the 2007 NBA playoffs (so far). It’s a good list but YouTube sucks for watching sports highlights…the quality is just too low. (via truehoop)
From a poll in the Guardian: George Orwell’s 1984 is the definitive book of the 20th century. Gatsby, Grapes, and Brave New World also make the top 10 list.
Another one of those lists you love to hate: the 25 best movies you’ve never seen. Putting the horrible Boondock Saints on the list is a major boner, especially just ahead of Peter Jackson’s pre-Rings gem Heavenly Creatures.
Twelve tips for travelling across the United States by train. “12. Train Love. I wish you the best of luck in finding a soulmate via subsidized government transportation.”
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