Link Banana

I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule.

A sound goal for us all.

(via Fimoculous)

You don’t have to agree with everything on Rex’s list to recognize that it’s probably one of the best end-of-year lists you’ll see.

Two potential replacements for myself:

• The New York Times’s Week In Review team now has a rather excellent linkblog. (via Snarkmarket)
• Google’s Hot Trends show what America really cares about. This instant, it’s Ted Kennedy. (via Fimoculous)

Sometimes the serendipity of my feedreader is just shocking. On the same day I saw picture of both the highest and lowest man-made objects. They are:

• Burj Debai. (via Fimoculous)
• A Siberian Diamond mine. (via Neatorama)

UPDATE (8/25/08): Or perhaps this is actually the lowest man-made object. (via Neatorama) I have mixed feelings about a hole that can’t be seen from above ground being meaninfully considered a hole.

…on Wikipedia. And enjoyed it. An interesting story:

Why I was compelled to be the one to change it, I couldn’t tell you, but that’s what I did. I added a “2008” as an ending date on his tenure at the show. I changed everything else to the past tense. And I did so post-haste.

I don’t know if the impulse was the same as the one that compelled that NBC subcontractor to go out and kill Tim Russert on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that it didn’t stem from a desire to make sure that the public was well-informed.

No, it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout “First!” on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time. After I had done my duty, dozens of others piled on, tweaking, retweaking, fixing and updating until my work was moot. But I got to that particular page first, and that left me ever-so-slightly chuffed.

(via Fimoculous)

This may be the reason YouTube was invented.

(via Fimoculous)

I’ve heard report’s that Mr. Letterman has been “phoning in” his performances recently, but this is a little over the top. Last week he repeated, nearly verbatim, four jokes he’d used just the night before.

(via Fimoculous)