Christmas Leftovers Links

* Listen, when Chris Ware tells you to buy a book, you buy it.

*��For a small group of comedy writers, however, their yearly viewing couldn��t be further from Bedford Falls. Instead, they gather ��round a never-aired 1996 Comedy Central special:��Escape From It��s A Wonderful Life.

smh if you don��t realize that George Bailey died in that river and the happy ending is just his sad delusion as he drowns

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 26, 2014

*��Caganer �� the strangest, most scatological part of Catalan nativity scenes ��explained.

* Jacobin remembers the Christmas truce, one hundred years old yesterday.

* Let 2015 be Year One of the post-carbon future.��4 Legal Battles This Year That Were All About Climate Change.��Sewage in the streets of Miami.��Could flooding finally wake Americans up to the climate��crisis?��Irreversible But Not Unstoppable: The Ghost Of Climate Change Yet To Come.

a dark, gritty CHRISTMAS CAROL reboot where Scrooge refuses to repent and then civilization is destroyed through excess carbon emissions

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 25, 2014

* The crazy history of Star Wars.

*��The Class Struggle in the North Pole.

* The Justice Department may investigate Milwaukee PD following the no-indict of the shooter��of Dontre Hamilton.

* Elsewhere on the local beat: A Milwaukee doctor says he has the answer to concussions.

* And, sadly:��Milwaukee’s poet laureate passes away.

*��Among recent graduates ages 22 to 27, the jobless rate for blacks last year was 12.4 percent versus 4.9 percent for whites, said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

* I missed this one in August: Tobias Wolff on the heart of whiteness.

* Subway sandwiches and the halo effect.

* 90-Year-Old Vet Arrested For Feeding Homeless Will Hand Out Christmas Eve Dinner.

* I can’t believe they made a movie out of Bill, The Galactic Hero.��I can’t wait to see it.

*��“I, Cthulhu, or, What��s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47�� 9�� S, Longitude 126�� 43�� W)?”

* A look inside 8chan, the worst place on the Internet: “The Mods Are Always Asleep.”

* There’s magical thinking, and then there’s��“Believing in Santa Claus could help your kids develop a cure for cancer.”

* Behold, the baby in the sun from Teletubbies.

* This was a nice, short, readable explanation of��how all the statistical analysis in The Bell Curve was bullshit.

*��10 Story Decisions Scifi And Fantasy Writers Ended Up Regretting.��Tough list to get down to just ten!

*��In the 1950s, Egypt and Britain played an old version of tit-for-tat. Egypt took the Suez Canal. The British decided to pay them back by stealing the river Nile itself. Yes, the whole Nile.

* A very J.R.R. Tolkien Christmas.

*��Parents Are Moving To The Same Towns Where Their Kids Go To College. When my kids go to college, I’m enrolling in their freshman classes. I don’t want to miss a moment.

*��Falsely Shouting Fire in a Theater: How a Forgotten Labor Struggle Became a National Obsession and Emblem of Our Constitutional��Faith.

*��New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks.

*��Pope Francis: ��One in 50�� Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals is a paedophile.

*��Pious Anxiety: Flannery O��Connor��s Prayer Journal.

* On Facebook and��Algorithmic Cruelty.

*��The Marvel Movie Universe, In Completely Chronological Order.

*��The melancholy of all things done” is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.��Buzz Aldrin and the dark side of the Moon.

* Of course you had me at “There’s a serious proposal to send astronauts to a floating cloud city in Venus’s atmosphere before heading to Mars.”

* A public service announcement: Black Mirror: White Christmas was fantastic. Find a way to watch it!