Links

1.  Ebert's top films of 2008.  Two thoughts while looking over the list:  the symbiosis of life/art seems to have held true this year as there's not a lot of cheer or humor in the mix (WALL-E may be as close as it gets and if you've seen it you know that while the ending is optimistic it's a backhanded optimism at best); you're going to have to search hard for a lot of these if you're outside a decent sized metropolitan area - a fact Ebert acknowledges with this bit at the end: 

Looking back over the list, I think most moviegoers will have heard of only about 11, because distribution has reached such a dismal state. I wrote to a reader about "Shotgun Stories," "I don't know if it will play in your town." She wrote back, "How about my state?" This is a time when home video, Netflix and the good movie channels come to the rescue. My theory that you should see a movie on a big screen is sound, but utopian.

2.  America's other auto industry here in the deep south - we'll be driving home for the holiday's in a few weeks and pass by three of these plants.

3.  Oven stoves and heat walls: long, interesting article with wonderful pictures. 

4.  SitOrSquat - use your phone's GPS to find the nearest public bathroom (also coming soon to a comedy plot line near you.) (via)

5.  Tim Harford says microcredit is working and raises some good questions.  (via)  

6.  I didn't know that Graham Linehan has a blog.  Poking around, this entry from the archives is a good discussion of the difficulty of putting together a comedy sitcom on either side of the pond and why I so vastly prefer those in the British tradition - I like my comedy with a healthy dose of the absurd.  If you haven't seen Linehan's IT Crowd do yourself a favor and hunt around for it.  Oh, and I also found this:

7.  When Pomeroy and I were kids one of our favorite pranks was to use the phone at his parent's office to dial two random numbers and conference them as they both picked up the phone.  You'd be surprised at how amusing an argument between two strangers over who had called whom could be to twelve year old boys.  However, we certainly never imagined that our calls might precipitate a nuclear war.  Suddenly this seems much more plausible.  My favorite line from the article:

"It was a little alarming, to say the least."

(via)