Welcome to the Whitehouse, President Obama!
It's been a loooong wait.

The Atlantic's Diagram of the Bush Years

Bill Frisell's infinite styles (newyorker)
Just saw him play in Trenton, NJ last week. Spectacular.

In an attempt to ruin a great story and bring shame on themselves, Spirit Airlines is trying to charge flight 1549 passengers a cancellation fee for not using their return tickets from North Carolina. The flight there only made it as far as the Hudson River.

Andrew Wyeth, RIP

Google Earth brings astounding resolution to art at the Prado Museum

To access the pieces from The Prado, turn on 3D buildings in Google Earth. Then fly to "Prado Museum Spain." You can choose to wander around the museum or click on the collection icon to peruse the available works.

The Day the Music Died (youtube, another Microsoft crime against humanity)

How to halluncinate with ping pong balls and a radio

The Hidden Cost of War
In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld estimated a war with Iraq would cost $60 billion. Five years later, the cost of Iraq war operations is more than 10 times that estimate. So what's behind the ballooning figures? Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilme's exhaustively researched book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, breaks down the price tag, from current debts to the unseen costs we'll pay for many years to come.

William Zantzinger, asshole, portrayed by Bob Dylan in his 1963 song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol" recently died. (Guardian, UK)
Link to 2004 Daily Jive post on same.

The slander couldn't have happened to a nicer person. After getting out of jail, Zantzinger became involved in real estate, only to be arrested in 1991 for fraud. He was fined $62,000 and sentenced to 2,400 hours of community service.

"[Dylan] is a no-account son of a bitch," Zantzinger told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes in 2001. "He's just like a scum bag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail. [The song is] a total lie."

So Burger King wants you to destroy 10 of your facebook friends ("sacrifice" !?) for a free whopper.

W and the Damage Done (salon)
To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms -- sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.

If you've been to the Jersey shore on a summer weekend night, you've seen, or maybe even performed, the Guido Fist Pump

"She left because she wanted to sit around on the couch and hold hands. Well, that's not in the cards for Master Legend."

So long 2008. Here's to you being the last shitty year of the 00's.

Time lapse of a book becoming a scupture

Grandeur Nature 2007 timelapse movie from ridindave on Vimeo.

Permanent Camping
Neat minimal getaway architecture from Australia. I could use one of these.

Add Up the Damage (Herbert,, NYtimes)
In our collective relieved anticipation for an Obama start, Bush and his villains are getting off easy.

Counties, municipalities, and states will join in the bankruptcy fiesta. It would be reasonable to expect collapsing services as a result. This would be a situation fraught with danger -- of rising crime, of public health emergencies as water systems are not kept up and sewage treatment becomes unaffordable. I don't imagine the federal government stepping into every Podunk or Metropolis from sea to shining sea and propping up these services. People will have to cope with danger and deprivation.
The Long Emergency author Jim Kunstler's predictions for '09

Would you like body-fries with that?
Burger King sells cologne, or body-spray, or whatever this nasty crap is.

10x Mangafication: Chris Scarborough takes photographs of real people then digitally manipulates the images to resemble cartoon manga.

Best HDR Images of 08

If programming languages were religions

Thankyouforthrowingyourshoe

I really want this
(again with the dezeen)

Amazing paper illustration of Yulia Brodskaya (via drawn)

Stay at My Home: industrial design for overnight guests (dezeen)

I've been having fun digging through the Google Life photo archive

Polaroid film is going the way of the rotary dial. The factory will produce it's last package on Dec 31. This is kind of sad. If you're action-minded, you could always write them a desperate letter.

http://www.princessunicorndoll.com/
Office fans rejoice.

Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we don't know who's right for the job (newyorker)
On teaching, football, and everything else...

Western Film Silent Movie Card collection (via gmt+9)

After 96 years, a printing press closes in Brooklyn.

When The One comes down, and bulbs of sweat pop from Star Child's brow, and the bass thumpasaurus slaps its cosmic tail against a lighted dance floor, every boo-tay in the house meets its neighbor as hineys mash together in plush synchronicity.
The Cosmology of Funkadelic
Can you get to that?

Mid-century illustrator Roy Doty's Christmas Card archive

White House altered documents on 'Coalition of the Willing' (rawstory)
The White House altered documents regarding the nations involved in the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" that aided the US invasion of Iraq.

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political science professor says he found that the White House had modified elements of its website dealing with the coalition and in some cases deleted key documents in the public record.

Japanese-American Animation Artists of the Golden Age
(cartoonbrew)

Lego Robot Rubik's Cube Solver.
Amazing

The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008
(alternet)

In the 20 years that we've published our annual list, we've covered corporate villains, scoundrels, criminals and miscreants. We've reported on some really bad stuff - from Exxon's Valdez spill to Union Carbide and Dow's effort to avoid responsibility for the Bhopal disaster; from oil companies coddling dictators (including Chevron and CNPC, both profiled this year) to a bank (Riggs) providing financial services for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; from oil and auto companies threatening the future of the planet by blocking efforts to address climate change to duplicitous tobacco companies marketing cigarettes around the world by associating their product with images of freedom, sports, youthful energy and good health.

But we've never had a year like 2008.

Anatomy of a Meltdown (newyorker)

Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde 1910-1917 (Getty Museum)
with pdf links to exhibit books.
(via gmt+9)

An in-depth study of Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring"

Cell Defender
I see the birthrate of suckers is still keeping pace.

"It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious."
Big 3 Automakers show up to DC in private planes.

[Conspicuous consumption, outdoors-style] When a treehouse has a commercial wine-bar, doesn't it defeat the purpose of 'treehouse'? It's beautiful architecture and all, but this whole extreme treehouse movement deleted the idea of rusticity.

About a 97-year old botanical arts maestro (pingmag)

The Mostly True Story of Helvetica and the New York Subway System
Really interesting reading on design for public use.

Mr. Etch-A-Sketch

Sine Wave Speech. A cool auditory illusion (via metafilter)

In the WTF category, this photo was literally, honestly published on the whitehouse.gov server. No shit.

So much has been said about the subprime mess, that it's getting difficult to find fresh perspective. I think this article delivers in spades.

The End (Portfolio) by Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker)

There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. "They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?"

fish-blimp (vid)

Private Snafu - Booby Traps (1944)
This is one of 26 Private SNAFU ('Situation Normal, All Fouled Up) cartoons made by the US Army Signal Corps to educate and boost the morale the troops. Originally created by Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Phil Eastman, most of the cartoons were produced by Warner Brothers Animation Studios - employing their animators, voice actors (primarily Mel Blanc) and Carl Stalling's music.

Vintage Cereal Box archive

When all you needed to sell cereal was a hillbilly goat.

Monomoto

A bizarrely minimalist Tokyo McDonalds (core77)

Early Star Wars storyboards (flickr)
If these are legit, I'm not sure why these aren't getting more play...

Honda Legs (sciam) with video (wmv)

Microbama

I want:
Fly Stick Van De Graff Electrostatic Wand

After the Imperial Presidency (Herald Tribune, longish)
The assertion and expansion of presidential power is arguably the defining feature of the Bush years. Come January, the current administration will pass on to its successor a vast infrastructure for electronic surveillance, secret sites for detention and interrogation and a sheaf of legal opinions empowering the executive to do whatever he feels necessary to protect the country. The new administration will also be the beneficiary of Congress's recent history of complacency, which amounts to a tacit acceptance of the Bush administration's expansive views of executive authority. For that matter, thanks to the recent economic bailout, Bush's successor will inherit control over much of the banking industry. "The next president will enter office as the most powerful president who has ever sat in the White House," Jack Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale and an influential legal blogger, told me a few weeks ago.

Flat bulb.
I'm not sure why there's a need for a flat lightbulb, but I like it.

Worst. Promotion. Ever.
Guinness Book of World Records-breaking pinata, here in Philly. That you're not allowed to break. Epic Suck.

Eventually, however, officials announced that the breaking would not be happening, and people were asked to leave.

Most spectators left by 3 p.m., many booing and expressing dissatisfaction as they left.

Heald apologized for the postponement, citing police concerns that the breaking would cause a surge of running to grab the pinata's contents (yeah, no shit. that's typically what happens when a pinata breaks. you were expecting maybe something else? -Ed).

Comics.com is releasing their entire United Features Syndicate archive for free, including every Peanuts strip ever drawn! Fantastic!

Make a flatbed scanner camera.

We did it. Now it's time to root out the gophers and stop the damage that Bush is dead-set on inflicting in his final weeks.
8 years of agonizingly wrongheaded and arrogantly corrupt policy don't lie. These guys know no shame and they're already hard at work on rewarding their crony constituency at the expense of the economy, human health and the environment. There's work to do.

Just cool.

VOTE!
George Bush won by 537 votes in Florida in 2000. We can't let this happen again. Your vote COUNTS! Make sure you use it and use it wisely. Our future depends upon it.

Krugman on what to expect next week from the Rump of the GOP (nytimes)

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

The ultra-lowfi "Get Your War On" is now published in video. Still works.

Wassup 2008
(see Wassup 2000)

Garmond Powerline

Mad Fold-Ins, Past and Present (times)

The Sentences of Sarah Palin, Diagrammed
(slate)

This post will mean absolutely nothing in 3 weeks. Amen.

Studies in Pen Art
A full pdf reproduction of a 1914 book on pen flourish.
(drawn.ca)

Joyce Hatto: The Great Piano Swindle (Intelligent Life)

Rod Williams investigates the biggest fraud in the history of recorded music--the story of how the husband of a dying British classical pianist fooled the critical establishment into acclaiming his wife, Joyce Hatto, as a genius ...

The Things He Carried (Atlantic)
Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.

Jack A: Inventor of the Cowboy Shirt (designobserver)
This is exactly what Jack A had hoped for when he put a silver buckle on the bolo lariat. He had a theory about it. "The bolo is a lot less formal than the conventional European silk necktie. Also, you can wear it with your shirt collars open which makes things more comfortable for a working man.” He had taken the European men's tie, a symbol of wealth, privilege and class authority and had loosened it up, democratized it. Life in Colorado, he felt, was less constrained than life back east or in the Old World and what you wore around your neck should reflect this new culture.

Partnership for a McCain-free Whitehouse

Another cool bicycle chainring gallery
(bikecult)

As desperation sinks in, Republicans are resorting to dirty voting tricks to keep new voters from registering. In Ohio, justice prevails (nytimes), but be sure that this sort of nonsense will be seen again in other districts.

What's that Tree in your Hair? (pingmag)

Washington Post uncovers more Bush Lying: The ever-corrupt, deceitful Bush administration issued a series of secret memos in 2003-4 authorizing torture.

Let's get some hard prison time out of these neocon subhumans this time, huh?

Palin as President

Human Digital Clock

Old Woodies

A small collection of teardrops and vintage canned ham trailers on the Tiny House Blog

off the political trail for a moment... a nice collection of Blue Note album covers

The true face of the Republican Party

Why was gas so expensive? (Consumerist)

Cleese on (Sarah) Palin: "Monty Python Could Have Written This"

Great TED-talk video. Check out the octopus at 4:25! (vid)

Licking the Zeitgeist: Go ahead, let the Obamafied optimism wash over you. For now
(sfgate)

They know their 15 minutes are up. They know they had their shot, gave it everything they had. Six solid years of complete control, their most potent leaders, their best ideas, war and terror and jingoism, anti-gay anti-women anti-science. Also: a million new surveillance cameras, ten thousand right-wing judges, a front-loaded Supreme Court, pummeling the line separating church and state, blaming gays for 9/11, keeping Christian rock alive, creepy museums in Kentucky where humans walk with dinosaurs.

And they failed. Spectacularly. Historically. Unsurprisingly.

In fact, their failure is now so complete, nearly every idea they offered up now proven to be so regressive and detrimental to the advancement of the human experiment, theirs will go down in history as one of the most profound collapses of any totalitarian power cluster in our short history. Mark your calendars. You were there. You survived. Barely.

Meet Sarah Palin's right wing radical pals (salon)
Whew.. talk about (literally) Anti-American.

So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”

AIG knows how to party (with your bailout money) (nytimes)
A week after the insurance giant the American International Group received an $85 billion federal bailout, executives at its life insurance subsidiary, AIG General, held a weeklong retreat at the exclusive St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif. Expenses for the week, lawmakers were told, included $200,000 for hotel rooms, $150,000 for food and $23,000 in spa charges.

[Make Believe Maverick] Rolling Stone uncovers the real McCain

"John has made a pact with the devil," says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the "Gang of 14," which blocked some of Bush's worst judges from the federal bench.

"On all three — sadly, sadly, sadly — McCain has flip-flopped," Chafee says. And forget all the "Country First" sloganeering, he adds. "McCain is putting himself first. He's putting himself first in blinking neon lights."