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Side orders

I have finally broken down and jumped on the sideblog trend. (See Graham, Andy, and Anil for my primary inspirations.) Back when I was first first hitting my stride with Snarkout, part of my idea was that I would take these assorted nifty links that I had found (from MetaFilter, other weblogs, random Google searches, whatever) and try to assemble some sort of halfway coherent narrative out of them. Slowly the "assemble narrative" part of my assignment grew; I'm regularly writing thousand-word squibs about perfectly inconsequential things right now. My pace of adding things to my notepad has entirely outstripped my ability to write Snarkout entries, and I've still got pages of these interesting links. The sideblog will be a place to share some of them, particularly those that are interesting in themselves I don't see any way of binding into something larger and worth reading. (Dorky tech links will also find their way there fairly often; if reading about of the history of both Jumbo the elephant and the C++ Standard Library sounds appealing, then you've got problems. Snarkout.org is the website for you!)

Sideout is up now; I'll be adding archives of some sort (probably monthly) and an RSS feed in the next few days. I still haven't decided whether it will appear on inside pages; I'm currently thinking that it shouldn't. If you disagree or I've just done horrible things to how the site renders in Netscape 2.3 (Finnish language) which is the only thing you can use at work and if you can't read my site you will absolutely die!, please let me know. I'm going to be tweaking the interior appearance a bit, so use the comments here if you want to weigh in on the controversial right margin question, too.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one Christmas morning

Two responses to the Christmas movies piece worth noting:

• Ray Davis, your go-to inTARweb expert in American movies from the first half of the century, suggested Remember the Night as a better Christmas movie than any of my suggestions. It stars Barbara Stanwyck as a shoplifter and Fred MacMurray as the D.A. she falls for one magical Christmas, and Ray notes that it has "at least one scene more nightmarish (because there's no waking up) than anything in It's a Wonderful Life". It doesn't appear to be out on DVD, but I'll see if the good local video store has it on VHS. Ray also asserts that the director, Mitchell Leisen, is a better director than Sturges (who wrote the script), which is good, because outside of Sturges' few tip-top movies -- which are as good as any screwball ever made -- I actually don't think his movies were very good.
• Claxy, after suffering through another holiday season of fruitcake jokes, informs me that there's actually a generally praised Scottish short film called Franz Kafka's "It's a Wonderful Life". Holy cow. I never would have guessed this. I doubt that even the mighty Video Americain will have a copy, but has anyone ever seen this? If so, please let me know: steve at youknowthedomain.org.