Akkam’s Razor

• Fimoculous.com - misc - 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008 - Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year[.]
• Inside the Playbook - The New York Times -

• Seizing the white space - SlideShare -
• Supermarkets’ emergency plans to keep shelves full | Business | The Observer - Fears that scores of supermarket suppliers will go bust next year have led the country’s major chains to draw up emergency plans to replace them, The Observer can reveal.

  Separately, on the high street, bailiffs are getting ready for their busiest Christmas ever, with a slew of retailers expected to go into administration.

• 20 Greatest Celebrity Courtroom Sketches -

• Retailer Survival Tips - Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog - The holidays are going to stink. But I'm hopeful that the crisis will be cathartic for retailers, and that the smart ones will embark in 2009 on the true journeys of reinvention that, up to now, they've barely even recognized, let alone begun.
• Philadelphia Will Do » Give This The Pulitzer - Does it get any better than these courtroom sketches of Rod Blagojevich? Why yes, yes it does, in the form of a Chicago Sun-Times story headlined, “Is Blago’s hair a sign of sickness?

• GOOD » Books Are the New Cars» - Another day, another imploding industry…
• Economist’s View: “Capitalist Fools” - Was there any single decision which, had it been reversed, would have changed the course of history? … The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. … The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.

• Bush by the Numbers - ProPublica - The Bush legacy - by the numbers…
• The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words — Copyblogger - You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ~Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride It may be inconceivable for you to misuse a word, but a quick look around the web reveals plenty of people doing it. And it’s all too easy when we hear or see others use words incorrectly and parrot them without knowing it’s wrong.

It is my personal opinion that some actors do Christmas movies, no matter how awful, just because it guarantees a constant source of revenue and residuals, either due to holiday DVD sales or annual broadcasts on broadcast or cable TV.

That said, here are some links to older posts on other blogs about some of my favorite (and hated) holiday videos:

• 11 Things you don’t know about A Christmas Story from Mentalfloss.
• 8 Reasons to love National Lampoons Christmas Vaction from MF.
• At the bottom of this post on MF, some facts about The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

• Glum Tidings: Santa Gets Sacked as Cities, Companies Look to Save - WSJ.com - This trend of skimping on civic cheer comes as a blow to many families. Their holidays at home will be more modest this year. Office parties will also be subdued. Now they can't even count on cherished holiday traditions in the town square.

It's been seething under the surface, aimed particularly at John Edwards and Mike Huckabee.  But as long as we remain distracted from the abstract and remote threats of the Culture War, the War on Immigration, and the War on Terror, and instead choose to worry about the cost of the war in Iraq as well as the nations own precarious financial system (which starts with the subprime mortgage market), the political race (and the races in the Senate and House of Representatives are going to be trending away from pro-Elitist messages in favor of strong traditional-Populist rhetoric.  (That's not to say that we haven't experienced targeted populistic campaigns in the past - Immigration, Welfare Reform, and Faith-Based Movements are all 'populism', in the sense that they act as popular dog-whistle within their own natural constituencies).