Late today, but hopefully you have some time off this week to dig into this feast of festive reading, listening, and viewing:
Happy invoicing!
- The Beatles Christmas Album - Every Christmas, the Beatles made a special record for members of their fan club. And here they all are to download, along with a number of bonus recordings.
- The Long Road Back: How to Keep Going After the Unimaginable Happens - "Two years ago I spent the day before Christmas in my new house in Stamford, Connecticut, with my three children—my daughter Lily, who was nine, and my twins, Sarah and Grace, who were seven. We played games, we sang songs, and we decorated the house. My mom made her famous apple pies and sugar cookies... The next thing I remember was waking up choking and running to the nearest window and opening it to breathe... At that point I hadn’t yet seen any flames—I had no way of knowing that the fire had already spread to the third floor." Madonna Badger (where do Americans get these names?) on the tragedy that devastated her life, and her struggle to recover.
- The Kid Should See This - "Not-made-for-kids videos for kids." Brilliant, and frequently updated, collection of links and videos to inform, educate, and entertain the kids - and you, of course
Here's the Nicholas Brothers in 1943 movie Stormy Weather, which Fred Astaire described as "The greatest dance number ever filmed":
- WarGames Magazine Identified - "Through the use of my knowledge of computer magazines, my sharp eyes, and other technical knowledge, I have overcome the limited amount of information available in the video content of WarGames and with complete certainty identified the exact name and issue number of the magazine read on screen by David L. Lightman in WarGames." As the researcher, Michael Walden, says: "This web page serves as an excellent example of how unexpected good things can come from the data stored at the Internet Archive."
- The Pedway: Elevating London - Documentary about the postwar plans for the concreting of the City of London in the name of traffic, traces of which can still be seen.
- Twelve Literary Facts about Christmas - "Since the festive season is almost upon us, we’ve gathered together the twelve most interesting literature-related facts about Christmas that we could find. So here they are, ‘The Twelve Facts of Christmas’ … with a literary link."
- The Pulp Magazines Project - "...is an open-access digital archive dedicated to the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century's most influential literary & artistic forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The Project also provides information on the history of this important but long neglected medium, along with biographies of pulp authors, artists, and their publishers." Loads of great reading here for when the allure of the Downton Abbey box set grows dim. You can even stay in period with delights such as a 1923 edition of I Confess:
- Buckminster Fuller Archive - "During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life's work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller's major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics... Some of the topics Fuller covered in this wide ranging discourse include: architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering." Something for you to watch when the Call The Midwife Christmas Special proves insufficiently intellectually challenging.
- The Unofficial Goldman Sachs Holiday Gift Guide - Shopping advice from @GSElevator. "Almost time for children to learn a valuable life lesson. Santa loves rich kids more."
- Comics With Problems - Extensive collection of comics addressing various important issues, from God's lousy cooking:
to finding a gun in Grandma's attic:
Happy invoicing!
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