• A profile of Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall. When I left Saskatchewan, I never dreamed that less than 10 years later it would be a booming economic powerhouse lead by an Armani-wearing young populist. [globe and mail]
• Charles Babbage: father of the computer, hater of musicians. [hark a vagrant]
• There was a time I would have listed Hal Hartley’s cult classic Trust as my all-time favourite movie, so I’m glad to see it get a little love. If it ever comes out on DVD, I’ll finally be able to ditch my VCR. [avclub]
• The Science News Cycle. [phd comics]
• The Acid Western. El Topo and Dead Man are just the beginning. [wikipedia]
• 25 truly great Calvin and Hobbes strips. Reading these reminded me of just how brilliant Bill Watterson’s strips were (no matter what certain girlfriends I could mention have to say about it). [progressive boink]

• The Benny Hillifier makes any video exactly as funny as Benny Hill! Yes, any video.
• Great interview with the warped director/icon John Waters.
• I’ve started listening to the CBC Ideas podcast series How to Think About Science, which promises to be quite interesting.
• Finally, learn to recognize your brain’s craven and deceitful nature with wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases.

• Patton Oswalt (who should just go ahead and crown himself the king of 30-something comic-book nerds) hasn’t seen Watchmen yet, but he thinks you should. He also thinks you should watch more TV.
• The AV Club’s Tasha Robinson compares the book to the film, and comes away loving both. Though I do disagree with her take on the film’s ending, which I like more the more I think about it.
• Roger Ebert makes Watchmen the focus of one of his patented brilliant, rambling essays, talking about the metaphysics of Dr Manhattan.
• And finally, Saturday Morning Watchmen! It’s short, but awesome and funny and a little creepy! Kind of like me.

• Roger Ebert writes a kind of four-star anti-review of Synecdoche, New York, and is then inspired to write a rambling, poetic essay on it.
• Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy, which he likens to Timothy Treadwell being eaten by a bear. Just one of many reasons why Chuck Klosterman is the reigning king of brainy hipsterdom and I’m just some guy.
• I haven’t seen a good overview of Tarantino’s upcoming Inglourious Basterds anywhere, but Wikipedia rounds up most of the details that are available. Apparently, it’s a Spaghetti Western-and-French New Wave-inspired take on the WWII action flick, with Brad Pitt as the leader of a group of Jewish-American soldiers who infiltrate occupied France to collect Nazi scalps. And it has Maggie Cheung as a Frenchwoman. Frankly, it sounds awesome.
• 2007 Independent Games Festival grand prize winner Aquaria has finally been released for OS X. I only just started it, but I’m pretty impressed so far. It’s beautiful and oddly meditative for a side-scrolling action game. Finally, I can live my dream of being a magical fish-woman who swims around in the ocean singing songs and collecting recipes!

Janelle’s visit was a great opportunity to get out and explore my new neighbourhood — when I’m by myself, I have a tendency to sit on the sofa surrounded by my laptop, DVDs, books, guitar, Atari 2600, and other amusements. As, for instance, right now. But can you blame me? Those 900-page Nixon exegeses and compilation volumes of Y: The Last Man aren’t going to read themselves, you know. And who will listen to all those Spaced commentary tracks if I don’t? You? My neighbour, who’s name may be Frodo or something that sounds like Frodo? Don’t make me laugh. And yes, I know I’ve plugged Spaced a lot lately. That’s because it’s awesome and I want you to go out and buy or rent or borrow it already, so you can thank me for turning you onto it.

Hmmm… I got a little off-track. What I wanted to say was that even a boring homebody like myself needs to get out of the house and do stuff every once in a while, which was going to lead into a clever segue about this web site: Walk Score. Which is, itself, pretty clever. You give it an address, and it generates a “walkability” score that tries to give an idea of how easy it is to get around the area on foot. It’s based on research that having lots of nearby amenities is the strongest predictor of how much people will walk. Using Google Maps, it computes the distance from the location to each of a checklist of amenities like grocery stores and movie theatres and sums up the score to get a walkability rating from 0-100. Most of Manhattan scores in the high 90s. Sprawls like Charlotte and Jacksonville average in the 30s.

It’s not perfect — of the 12 amenities it checks, I actually have 10 within the “perfect score” distance of 400 meters (everything but a cinema and a bookstore), but it only finds 6 of them. And it ignores things like transit and climate. You can walk 400 meters through January snowdrifts in Regina (and I have, many, many times), but it isn’t really “walkable” in the sense that you feel like you’re enjoying any particular positive quality of life. Which is why most people don’t walks if they can help it. Which is probably why Regina is mostly low-density housing and big box stores. (Well, one of the reasons.)

But this is still a pretty cool tool for someone like me who makes a point — and self-righteously at times, I might add — of not having a car. When I was looking for an apartment back in May, I really started to appreciate just how important it was to me to be somewhere walkable. So important, in fact, that I confined my search to places I knew had everything I needed nearby. It worked out, but to be honest, I still feel like I totally lucked out to land an apartment I like in such a plum location. With this tool, I might have been able to expand my search, instead of just rejecting the entire East Side out of hand.

It’s been a long time since I sent out a random link that you’ve probably already seen (but hey, even if you have, it’s new to me). Garfield Minus Garfield is… well, I’ll just let the site speak for itself:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

The really frightening thing is just how much I identify with this Jon Arbuckle.

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