Merry Christmas!!

• John Tolva shares his favorite link for the holidays: the Santastic Six album
• Forced Merriment: The True Spirit of Christmas
• PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” is actually true.
• A Brief History of Eggnog.
• Joke George Lucas made to Jon Stewart becomes Star Wars canon.
• The 20 Most Important Gifs Of 2011
• Randy Bachman demystifies the iconic opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night. Fab.
• Reuters picks their Best Photos of 2011.
• National Geographic’s Best Pictures of 2011.
• Why people friend/unfriend on Facebook.
• Twitter has followers, Google+ has plusketeers.
• The 10 Best TED Talks of 2011
• A Huge Collection Of Classic Christmas Movie Gifs Give the gift of gifs.
• Apple’s got the exclusive first trailer for The Hobbit.
• The Best Viral Videos Of 2011
• Popular Mechanics picks their 100 hottest cars of all time.
• The Official “Dark Knight Rises” Trailer
• More Trailers: Prometheus; The Avengers; Wrath of the Titans.
• 50 years of Doctors, companions, Masters and Cybermen in one easy-to-follow infographic.
• The SNL Weekend Update Reunion/Joke-Off
• Dress like Bond.
• The worst corporate identity redesigns of 2011.
• The 100 Best Twitter Accounts of 2011
• Anonymous donors pay off Kmart layaway accounts
• RIAA and Homeland Security Caught Downloading Torrents 
• 8 Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Your Favorite Holiday Music
• The Biggest Conspiracy Theories Of 2011
• Top 10 Top Ten List.
• Obama’s surprisingly good 2011
• The Fifty Funniest Headlines Of 2011
• An Honest Lexus Commercial
• The 13 Most Horrifying Classic Christmas Songs Of All Time
• The Fifty Greatest Sports Plays Of 2011 So far.
• A Ton Of Pictures Of Kate Upton Before She Was Famous
• Gifs From Movies, The Website
• Every Cast Member Of SNL Ranked From Worst To Best
• Dear Santa Letter sent 100 years ago found up chimney

Santa’s evening work calculated:

There are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That’s about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second. Totally doable.

Stephen Budiansky spells it out:

I have been perplexed for some time why Newt Gingrich is routinely acknowledged even by his bitter enemies within the Republican Party as a “genius,” but the answer turns out is simple: he acts exactly like one of those obnoxious elitist intellectual know-it-alls that the right-wing no-nothings think is the hallmark of an intellectual. He is constantly reminding us of his doctorate in history; he routinely claims he understands issues more deeply than anyone else; he has made a career of denouncing or (when he had the authority) eliminating professional expertise that might challenge his own certain pronouncements; and he is a veritable fount of crackpot “big” ideas (mining minerals on the moon, protecting the United States from sci-fi doomsday scenarios, and “fundamentally transforming” everything as a first step to doing anything.

Via Seth Godin:

The internet is an engine of connection. It has been from the start (email, chat, forums, blogs, social media…)

One reason that so many of the most popular sites online are those that permit people to express and expose their ideas is that those are the pages we care most about. We go back to see how people responded, how the traffic is, what we can do to improve the page.

Lifestyle media isn’t a fad. It’s what human beings have been doing forever, with a brief, recent interruption for a hundred years of professional media along the way. That interruption is fading away, and lifestyle media is resurging. People publish. Instead of denigrating user-generated content (what an obscure way to describe human stories), marketers need to understand that this is what we care about.

We shouldn’t be surprised when someone chooses to publish their photos, their words, their art or their opinions. We should be surprised when they don’t.

Publish your own stories. I’m doing it mostly to have a great collection of my work to give to friends and family.

Will Truman imagines the Republican race as fiction:

If someone had written a TV show and the plot followed the current Republican primary, I would have some serious problems with it. Namely, I would pan the show as unrealistic. A joke. Liberal Hollywood’s parody of what the Republican Party is.

Sean Carroll makes a list of facts and very strong opinions about the nature of time. My two favorites:

4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious – clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds.

5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms.

At Comics Alliance, Chris Sims makes such a good argument that I can only gape and think, “Oh my god, why had I never noticed this before?”

Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.

I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.

But it’s not just that the crooks in Scooby-Doo are liars; nobody ever shows up to bilk someone out of their life savings by pretending to be a Nigerian prince or something. It’s always phantasms and Frankensteins, and there’s a very good reason for that. The bad guys in Scooby-Doo prey on superstition, because that’s the one thing that an otherwise rational person doesn’t really think through. It’s based on belief, not evidence, which is a crucial element for the show. If, for example, someone knocks on your door and claims to be a police officer, you’re going to want to see a badge because that’s the tangible evidence that you’ve come to expect to prove their claim. If, however, you hold the belief that the old run-down theater has a phantom in the basement, then the existence of that phantom himself — or at least a reasonably convincing costume — is all the evidence that you need to believe that you were right all along. The bad guys are just reinforcing a belief that the other characters already have, and that they don’t need any evidence before because it’s based in superstition, not reason.

… To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them.

One of the staples of all those films is popularly called “The Spielberg Face.” It’s described as a look with “eyes open, staring in wordless wonder in a moment where time stands still.” You see a double example of it above from Jurassic Park but it’s literally in every single one of his movies, and often way more than once. A new video essay has been posted dissecting the uses of “The Spielberg Face,” its origins, subversions and much more.