Last 100 posts, part 10

This is the tenth installment in an occasional series of updates to recent kottke.org posts. The previous installment was posted last April. I should do this more often.

Several scholars contacted me to say that Dr John Casson’s “discovery” of six new works by William Shakespeare is not really all that notable, the consensus being that Casson is a hack with little credibility among serious researchers. Wikipedia has a good page on the Shakespeare Apocrypha, “a group of plays that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons”. (thx, jeffrey & nick)

Obviously the walking tour map of some of NYC’s independent bookstores was incomplete. A more comprehensive list is available here. (thx, margaret)

More on Detroit and visuals of the recession. The Big Picture collects some Scenes from the Recession (this cluster of unused newspaper racks is the best metaphor for the current state of the print media industry I’ve seen). Vice has a slideshow of photos of abandoned schools in Detroit. Sweet Juniper’s thoughts on and photographs of Detroit (also at Flickr). Can Detroit wean itself away from the car as a method of urban transportation? Daily oil paintings of Detroit. (thx, kathy, linda, jennifer, cathy & er, jennifer)

And Iceland, seemingly the Detroit of the North Atlantic these days. In addition to Michael Lewis’ piece in Vanity Fair, there’s Ian Parker’s for the New Yorker (full piece, reg. req.), and Joshua Hammer in Portfolio. And from August 2007, this piece by Max Keiser on Al Jazeera highlights the kind of trade that got Iceland into trouble. (thx, oliver, jennifer & david)

Getting into character discussed how people in different professions (athletics, business, acting) become different people when they are at work. Here are three more examples: Kobe Bryant, Brian Dawkins (as a player, he models himself after the X-men’s Wolverine and speaks in tongues before games…the first five minutes of the video are amazing), and Jonathan Papelbon. See also: The Inner Game of Golf. (thx chris, noah, david, and unlikely words)

kottke.org has a mobile site at m.kottke.org.

HD Tetris. It took 42 minutes for someone to complete four lines and they received only 160 points. And every once in awhile, the game throws out a piece that’s 8 units tall. (thx, jared)

Regarding 50 reasons why Jedi totally sucks, at the bottom of this copy is also 10 reasons why Jedi doesn’t totally suck. (thx, marcus)

Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace was a popular post this week.

Lots of good ideas in the things needing a redesign thread.

Hidden in a late paragraph of the WSJ piece on Reagan’s possible attempt to convert Gorbachev to Christianity is that Jimmy Carter did the same thing with South Korea’s leader Park Chung Hee. (thx, martin)

Nine years earlier, Reagan’s predecessor Jimmy Carter had stunned his aides when he asked the South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee about his religious beliefs and then told Park, “I would like you to know about Christ.”

If you’re interested in the goings-on in the global economy, kottke.org’s 2008recession tag is shaping up quite nicely.

Stuff I’m still thinking a lot about: amortality, how originality and innovation might be a dead end, the ecosystem metaphor, saving my childish things for my child, if I need to develop a character, nightclub hand signals, and The Pale King.

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