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Top 10 most litigious US companies from 2001-2006 (based on trademark cases): 1. Microsoft. 2. Cendent. 3. Altria/Philip Morris. 4. Best Western. 5. Dunkin’ Donuts. 6. Lorillard Tobacco. 7. Levi Strauss. 8. Baskin-Robbins. 9. Chanel. 10. Nike. Found in the sidebar of this article on Levi Strauss suing other jeans companies for their triangle pockets.
A list of 16 genuinely good Oscar-winning songs. As noted in the comments, Lose Yourself by Eminem should have been included.
Two structural engineers pick their ten favorite man-made structures.
If Roger Federer keeps going the way he’s going, he could one day be considered the greatest sportsman in history.
Update: Via email, a nomination for Pakistani squash player Jahangir Khan, who engineered a 5+ year unbeaten streak during which he won the International Squash Players Association Championship without losing a single point. (thx, abbas)
Update: Also via email, a vote for darts champion Phil Taylor, who has won 13 world titles, including 11 out of the last 13. (thx, krush)
The top 100 fonts as determined by a panel of designers and type experts. Top 10: Helvetica, Garamond, Frutiger, Bodoni, Futura, Times, Akzidenz Grotesk, Officina, Gill Sans, and Univers. A PDF of the results (with photos, in German) is also available. (via type for you)
Two lists, both alike in dignity: the top 10 best best actress Oscar winners and the top 10 worst best actress Oscar winners. Anyone they missed?
The Oscar nominees have been announced. Compare with the top movies as determined by the film critics.
A list of Reel Pop’s ten favorite dystopian films. Running Man, La Jetée, and Blade Runner all make the cut.
Over at Typophile, they’re debating the 20 most important type designers of all time.
Metacritic’s aggregated view of the film critics’ top 10 lists is always worth a look, both for the information and the information design. United 93 appeared on the most lists and tied with Army of Shadows for most #1 rankings.
1994 best/worst-of the internet lists with predicitons for 1995. “Pick any tragic event and you can probably recall seeing a newsgroup that taunted its seriousness. There was alt.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack. Then we had alt.lorena.bobitt.chop.chop.chop. And no, I haven’t forgotten alt.oj-simpson.drive.faster.”
Compiling a list of the best things I’ve linked to from kottke.org seems to get harder each year. I estimate posting about 2400 links to kottke.org in 2006, which is roughly one link every 2.5 hours on weekdays. Which is insane…I don’t know how you guys read all of that. Last year I managed to whittle down the best-of list to ~65 links (2004’s list had ~40 links), but I couldn’t manage less than 100 this year. (Hell, the overflow list contains another 100 links that didn’t quite make the cut…hopefully I’ll be posting those in a few days.)
But enough with the statistics. Besides containing some really entertaining, informative, and provoking reading/viewing material, this list also functions as kottke.org’s year in ideas for 2006, akin to the annual list in the NY Times Magazine. Climate change, the industrialization of childbirth, race & class in college & professional sports, the inherent messiness of science, adults who don’t want to grow up, the role of journalism in the age of information abundance, and how creative work gets done are all ideas represented in the links below. Even the funny YouTube videos signal the arrival in 2006 of online video, especially if you throw Ze Frank in the mix. Enjoy.
Pruned found art in petri dishes. More.
The M.C. Escher-inspired art of Rob Gonsalves.
David Remnick’s review of An Inconvenient Truth (and short biography of post-2000 Al Gore).
A collection of color photographs of WWII-era America from the Library of Congress. (I color-corrected some of the photos.)
New Yorker piece about the possible solving of the Poincare conjecture by Grigory Perelman.
NY Times Magazine piece by Michael Lewis on Michael Oher, excerpted from his book, The Blind Side.
The Smoking Gun’s takedown of James Frey was fair, accurate, and devastating.
Line Rider. Not quite a game, not quite a toy, but hours of fun.
Tetris documentary, From Russia With Love.
Stabilized version of the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Matthew Barney and Bjork on the phone with Ikea.
The Omarosa Experiment reveals the inner workings of reality TV.
Dorodango: shiny balls of mud.
Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs taken with a tilt-shift lens spawned some amazing Photoshopped fakes on Flickr.
Details on how to speak to a live customer support person for hundreds of companies. Indispensable.
The story of how Pixar came to be.
Wasp creates zombie cockroaches.
Falling sand, another not-a-game game.
Tap out a rhythm and Song Tapper will tell you what song it’s from.
London Tube map where all the stations are sponsored by companies.
The Simpsons intro done with live actors.
Interview with Jonathan Rauch about his popular piece about introverts for The Atlantic Monthly.
Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness.
Pregnancy is a tug of war between mother and fetus over nutrients.
Extensive primers for more than three dozen film genres.
It’s a bad time to start a company.
Horrible Segues, With Local Anchorman Clive Rutledge.
American Express commercial directed by Wes Anderson.
Photo essay of female Israeli soldiers.
The four different types of explanations.
Pictures I Like For a Variety of Reasons.
David Copperfield thwarts would-be robbers with slight of hand. Hands down, the link of the year.
Magnum photographer Paul Fusco’s photo essay of Chernobyl survivors.
Dozens of old Sesame Street clips on YouTube.
How to cure your asthma or hayfever using hookworm.
How one man fell for a Nigerian email scam.
Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner tell us that expert performers — in math, football, ballet, chess — are made, not born.
Michael Wolf’s 100x100, 100 photos of Hong Kong apartments each 100 square feet in size.
1989 New Yorker profile of Errol Morris.
Dozens of historical sounds in mp3 format.
10,000 sheep created by people hired online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program.
Web 2.OH, YEAAHH!! t-shirts. Pun of the year.
Extensive gallery of Russian/Soviet propaganda and advertising posters.
Implanting magnets in your fingertips gives you a sixth magnetic sense.
A history of Manhattan’s diamond district and its informal historian, Stephen Kilnisan.
Photographs of a flock of more than a million European starlings.
Photographs of burn victims by John Brownlow.
What if great photographers posted their work on the web?
Why play “what if”? Here’s an Henri Cartier-Bresson being rubbished on Flickr.
An image of human eyes placed above an honesty pay box results in more people paying for their food/drinks. More.
A blue-skinned family in the hills of Kentucky. More.
Daniel Raeburn writes about his stillborn daughter Irene. About two years later, her sister Willa is born.
Easily mispronounced domain names.
Turning innocuous video clips into naughty scenes with selective bleeping. Hilarious.
Kristoffer Garin follows a group of American men on a bride-hunting trip to the Ukraine.
MotherLoad, an extremely addictive online game.
Watch as Lake Peigner drains entirely into a hole created by an errant oil drill. More info.
The Art of the Shiv, a photo essay of prison weapons.
The Show with Ze Frank. The most consistently entertaining and informative online media in 2006.
The physical impossibility of gigantic and microscopic movie creatures.
Argentina on Two Steaks a Day.
Bijou’s Bag of Tricks. This photo makes me laugh until I cry.
Geoffrey Chaucer gets an Xbox 360.
Six years of daily photographs compiled into a movie.
The Voyager spacecraft escapes from the solar system.
David Foster Wallace writes about Roger Federer as Religious Experience.
The vast majority of the decisions in the Senate are made for economic reasons, not social ones.
1964 New Yorker profile of Bob Dylan.
How to Write a Fugue, featuring a fugue of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again”.
State of Emergency, a surprisingly political fashion shoot from Vogue Italia.
What if the inflight announcement you heard while traveling was honest?
The photography of Corey Arnold, particularly of the Bering Sea crabbers.
Billionaire Steve Wynn pokes a hole in one of his Picassos with an errant elbow.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about the myth of prodigy.
Atul Gawande tells us how childbirth became industrialized.
2003 New Yorker profile of the late R.W. Apple by Calvin Trillin.
Time lapse video of a man putting on 155 t-shirts, one over the other.
The world’s best worst movie pitches.
Why There Almost Certainly Is No God by Richard Dawkins.
Scott Adams cures himself of losing his voice.
Phil Gyford’s beginner’s guide to freelancing.
New Yorker profile of Will Wright.
Maureen Gibson finds a picture of her rapist on the Engagements page of her hometown newspaper.
Comedian Aries Spears does great impressions of rappers Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Jay-Z.
A cognitive neuroscience grad student games Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
How to talk to a climate skeptic.
NPR piece with Jason Simmons, professional rock, paper, scissors player.
Lasse Gjertsen’s Amateur music video.
What NFL games are going to be on in your part of the country?
Photo of young homeless man Beavis shooting up in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
NPR interview with Ed Burns, creator of The Wire.
Hans van der Meer’s photos of European soccer fields.
Giant magazine’s list of the 50 greatest commercials of the 80s (with accompanying videos).
Slate interview with Ed Burns, creator of The Wire.
Writers Dreamtools History by Decades…facts, figures, styles, language, and goings-on for fiction writers.
Thirteen photographs that changed the world, featuring Robert Capa, Man Ray, Matthew Brady, and Ansel Adams.
Perched on top of Time magazine’s list of best video games for 2006? Wii Sports.
10 kick ass opening credit sequences from movies (+ accompanying YouTube videos). The credits for Se7en will forever be my favorite, if only because they inspired me (in part) to become a designer.
Slate’s Year in Culture, the most amazing and disappointing cultural events for 2006.
Last.fm keeps track of what music I like so I don’t have to. Here’s a list of my favorite artists from 2006, apparently:
1. Boards of Canada
2. Ladytron
3. Cloud Cult
4. Marumari
5. Gnarls Barkley
6. Metric
7. John Digweed (good coding/writing music)
8. Röyksopp
9. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
10. Alexandre Desplat (Syriana soundtrack, haven’t listened to this in six months)
11. Mogwai
12. Sigur Ros
13. Mint Royale (I didn’t even like this)
14. Daft Punk
15. The Smashing Pumpkins (golden oldies)
16. Fischerspooner
17. Coldplay
18. Broken Social Scene
19. Sound Advice (Gnarls/Biggie mashup)
20. Bloc Party
21. Ulrich Schnauss
22. Sasha (good coding/writing music)
23. Wolf Parade (didn’t like this either)
24. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
25. Arctic Monkeys (nor this)
Not sure this is such an accurate representation of the music that I enjoyed this year. And where’s CSS? I’ve been listening to them a ton in the last couple of weeks and they’re not even on the list. Upon closer inspection, it looks like last.fm doesn’t include the current month in their “rolling year charts”.
The BBC’s annual list of 100 things we didn’t know last year. “Barbie’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts.” Here are the 2005 and 2004 editions. The Tampa Tribune has a list of 50 things for 2006.
Top 100 wines of 2006 according to Wine Spectator. (via lists 2006)
The top 10 underreported news stories in 2006, including US funds going to the Taliban and Israel & Iran holding secret talks.
Paper Thin Walls is offering an mp3 mix tape of their favorite music writers’ favorite songs of 2006…that’s 31 mp3s for free. (via art fag city)
The proprietor of the Book Design Review blog picks his favorite book covers of 2006.
The top 5 most dangerous roads in the world, but I liked these roads carved through rock better.
Prospect Magazine lists the most overrated and most underrated books of 2006. Top 3 overrated are The God Delusion, The Blunkett Tapes, and Everyman. I so agree about Everyman…it’s the only book I read this year where I genuinely wanted my money back at the end of it. (via mr)
Every year, Regret the Error1 publishes a roundup of the year’s media errors and corrections. I didn’t think anything could beat these corrections from the 2005 list:
Norma Adams-Wade’s June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.
The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’
but the 2006 collection is a strong one. Here are some of my favorites:
A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka.
In Wednesday’s Taste section, a Washington Post recipe on Page F7 included an incorrect cooking time for carbonada (braised beef with onions and red wine). The dish should be cooked for 2 1/2 hours, not 10 to 20 minutes.
Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans.
A story in the July 24 edition of the Sentinel & Enterprise incorrectly spelled Sheri Normandin’s name. Also, Bobby Kincaid is not a quadriplegic.
The regional court in Duesseldorf ordered the weekly WirtschaftsWoche to print a correction to an article that claimed Piech wore “garish ties with hunting motifs” and did not know the exact number of his children from various marriages, a court spokesman said. The magazine, owned by the Handelsblatt group, had published a picture of Piech wearing a tie with a picture of a man with a gun and an elephant. It quoted Piech as saying in an interview that he had sired “about a dozen children. The exact number is not known”. The court accepted Piech’s argument that his comment had been meant ironically and that the motif on his tie was not a hunting motif…
Mr Wakefield is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party. The error is regretted.
In a March 17 story about protests planned against the Iraq war, The Associated Press erroneously identified Jeremy Straughn as a political socialist at Purdue University. He is a political sociologist.
She’s got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She’s African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that. [He meant “coup”.]
Recent articles in this column may have given the impression that Mr Sven Goran Eriksson was a greedy, useless, incompetent fool. This was a misunderstanding. Mr Eriksson is in fact a footballing genius. We are happy to make this clear.
I especially like the recipe ones…just the thought of some unsuspecting reader eating her meatballs with all those chilies or the fellow debating whether he should serve his obviously raw braised beef to the rest of his family. Be sure to check out the whole list.
[1] When I first posted this, I misspelled “Regret” as “Reget”. (No, really!) I deeply regret the error. (thx, mauayan)↩
Premiere magazine’s list of the 20 most overrated movies of all time. (via lists 2006)
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