¶ Eddie Bauer, 1966. (A Continuous Lean)

¶ T-Shirt War. (via  MetaFilter)

¶ Crazy Apartments. (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Zooming in on the Mandelbrot to e.214. (kottke.org)

¶ Some dust jackets and book covers for Philip K Dick. (Spine Out; via The Second Pass)

¶ Europe’s “alcohol belts” — where wine, beer, or spirits are preferred (and why Hungary may be more Mediterranean than you think). (Strange Maps)

¶ Haiti, by Peter Turnley (The Online Photographer)

¶ Googolopoly. (via reddit)

¶ Electoral College Reform (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Visualizing the campaign finance case. (via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Shelving books spines in. (Apartment Therapy)

¶ 1602 Chinese map of the Gulf Coast. Our Gulf Coast. (Guardian)

¶ Cheap at $12,000,000 — even Choire Sicha thinks so! Take the tour. (Business Insider)

¶ Sculptor Cal Lane. Love those shovels! (The Best Part)

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

¶ Jiří Å alamoun’s Basic Phrenology.

¶ It never hurts to ask. (And whatever happened to Carolyn Weatherhogg later on?)

¶ Stonehenge-under-High.

¶ How long before Bill Cunningham snaps this in titanium on a fashionista at his favorite corner of town?

We need something more seasonal for this space — but then isn’t that what the holidays are all about? You can always do better! But what we are trying to do better at the moment is vacation.

¶ Frank Rich’s column about bamboozlers is great, but it might be greater, by stressing the complete failure of media to exert critical authority. The Times itself thinks that this is largely a matter of keeping naughty words off the record. No wonder readership is down.

¶ Handwriting: a new frontier for sentimentalists. Ann Trubek argues persuasively that it has no place in schools. (via  The Morning News)

¶ Oy! Why did I wait to make a reservation for my birthday until the day on which Sam Sifton’s three-star review of La Grenouille appeared? Not to worry: the restaurant re-opens after its holiday break on the next day, and we’re down for 7:30. — The Editor.

¶ Dream Library (Marginal Revolution)

¶ It’s like playing with an the peel of a clementine. (New Scientist)

¶ We must have this chair! If only to look at. (ArtCat)

¶ An Silhouettes of Jazz — moving shadows generated by computer-generated mini-sculptures, and very nearly as cool as the music. (Brain Pickings)

¶ The good old days of sharp collegians. (Ivy Style)

¶ How China is perceived by the residents of Beijing, Shaghai, and Hong Kong — respectively but not respectfully. (The Atlantic)

Whoa! Our 30th law school reunion takes place next year. It’s unlikely that we’ll go, what with one thing and another. Not that we don’t love reunions — when they take place in Manhattan! We do, after all, live in the center of the universe! Perversely, however, we went to law school within the ambit of the one town on earth (a windy, lakeside locale) that refuses to acknowledge the self-evident truth of the matter.

Our class secretary (a judge!) sent this montage out the other day, by way of dire warning. I share it with you because I photographed at least six of the eleven images, and may have taken two others. Can you tell which ones?

I know that it was supposed to be law school, but, gawd, I had fun!

¶ Matins: “Unseemly” is the nicest word that I can come up with to characterize attempts by the Roman Catholic Church (and other religious organizations) to block a temporary repeal of the statute of limitations on child abuse.

¶ Lauds: Is there a movie here? As the UN prepares to evacuate its Turtle Bay headquarters for a four-year renovation, lots of valuable artworks seem to have been evacuated earlier, less officially.

¶ Prime: A new and very smart-looking literary blog, The Second Pass.

¶ Tierce: Muntader al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at our last president, was jailed immediately after the “insult, not an assault”; he has just been sentenced to three years in prison. Bernie Madoff will spend less time in jail prior to sentencing — presumably. I must say, prison looks more and more like the waste of a public good in cases involving the crimes (and “crimes”) with which these men have been charged.
 
¶ Sext: One great thing about the recession so far is the way it has replaced “because I can” with “because it’s smart” as a principle of style. Consider the chic $300 re-think.

¶ Nones: Soi-disant Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “forgives” Ukraine its penalty debts in the wake of winter’s gas crisis.

¶ Vespers: Nina McLaughlin re-reads Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, at Bookslut. It’s not the book she remembered!

¶ Compline: At the Infrastructurist, Barbara McCann writes about a bill in Congress that might make the economic stimulus/transportation vector a lot smarter. Also, a great pair of before-and-after photos.

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Morning

¶ Posh: My good friend Yvonne just tipped me off to a fantastic send-up of cooking shows, starring Richard E Grant at his twitissime, “Posh Nosh.” The show is a hundred years old, so you’ve probably see it already…

Noon

¶ Mad Max: Poor Max Mosley — so to speak. For my part, I can’t imagine anything more in keeping with Formula 1 racing than recreational sado-masochism. One does wonder, though, what Lady Redesdale would have said. “Every time I see “Peer’s Daughter” in the newspaper…”

Night

¶ Cartographic: Is it or isn’t it? An optical illusion, that is. How big is England?

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Do not miss Roman’s floor plans for “1000 Fifth.”

Union Square at the worst time of the year.

This week, I shall be very brief. I went to see There Will Be Blood because I hoped that it would disprove my discomfort with this year’s Academy Awards nominations. Three of the five best-picture nominees are intensely violent, male-centered dramas. (I say this without having seen No Country For Old Men.) A fourth, Atonement, offers a distinctly unsympathetic critique of the male hierarchy of class background, but it is not without its cataclysms. Only Juno resists this rampant guyism.

There Will Be Blood turns out to be about nothing more than how awful a man can be — and how symphonically that awfulness can be represented on the screen. Potential background stories about such things as the imaginative poverty of the American frontier, cavalier attitudes toward workplace safety, or the anaerobic deadweight of extractive economies are muddled by the protagonist’s bewilderingly inconsistent sociopathy. What this film boils down to is the virtuosity of Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting — and of the men and women of the film’s Makeup Department.

What was the Academy thinking?

Fossil Darling is cleaning his attic, and he wanted to know if I’d seen this clip. No, I hadn’t, but I found it quite exquisitely appalling.