I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

This, from the wife of the mayor of Kansas City, is the Best Christmas Letter in the History of Best Christmas Letters.

Also, their Website is Most Excellent.

AN UPDATE: Thanks to all for your comments. Yes, I know that we’re talking about Kansas City, Mo. here. I grew up 30 miles on the Kansas side from the city. I am familiar with State Line Road. I tagged this post ‘Kansas’ because, well, I talk about Kansas a lot on this blog and, as Grandpa Simpson would say, I’ll be cold and dead in the ground before I recognize Missouri.

This, a long, thoughtful post by a woman on her life with a ‘black’ name, is more than a little interesting, and a great read.

New video from Boston Dynamics.

I, for one, would like to welcome our Cyclon overlords.

Andrew Romano’s Stumper has a nice bit on the Obama Pennsylvania flap

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Remember the guy who was trapped alone in an elevator in NYC for an entire weekend? This week, the New Yorker has some amazing footage from the surveillance camera inside the elevator.

It’s part of a nice Nick Paumgarten piece on elevators, which are perhaps the single most important element in the lives of New Yorkers, even the poors like me who live in walkups. The lesson, of course: Never get on an elevator without food and water. And maybe a copy of War and Peace.

Today in parallelism: Right now I’m reading Gain, the Richard Powers novel that draws parallels between capitalism and cancer, and I came across this project by the Chicago photographer Brian Ulrich that explores some of the same themes (h/t Frangry). Some really great pictures that cover some of the same ground that my friend Matt Nighswander hit in his Chicagoland project a few years ago.

If you subscribe to the theory that a good advertisement should provoke, the new commercial for Nike SPARQ is one of the better ones around. You’ve seen it if you’ve watched more than five minutes of any televised athletic even in the past month—it’s the one where different athletes, pro and am, look into the camera and tell you how “my better is better than your better:”

Somehow, I don’t love a commercial that says anybody who uses this product is a trash-talking asshole.

On the other hand, this version is pretty nice, especially since it uses a good song by Saul Williams:

The new ad campaign for milk is pretty amazing:

Thoughts on the Kansas-North Carolina game

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The excellent Jesse Ellison has a nice interview in Nwk with the author; I loved the book, and the interview is almost as good.

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