• culled from the Barrett.Hall page on del.icio.us, my favorite tool of the year (though flickr is close).•

The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager
Seriously, I can’t get enough name stuff between this and Freakonomics, and this handles big numbers so beautifully.

http://www.themoviespoiler.com/
to find out what happened when you fell asleep

Whiskey Bar: Scenes From the Bunker
on the administration’s treatment of dissent

Project Blinkenlights: Arcade Games
gigantic games via cell phone on Euro buildings.

Secretary On the Offensive (washingtonpost.com)
Asked about the number of insurgents in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, “I am not going to give you a number for it because it’s not my business to do intelligent work.”

NYT call to action on Darfur, w/ pictures
[I'm working on getting the full text, now archived by the NYT]
Maybe we ought to just accept that we should stop saying “never again”.

LEGALDOCS / Living Will – State Specific
and yet, after ALL that – haven’t done it yet.

Reason: The Pentagon’s Secret Stash
Why we’ll never see the second round of Abu Ghraib photos.

RollingStone.com: The Long Emergency : Politics
“What’s going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?”

Unintentionally sexual comic book covers: Part 1.
I can’t add to these pictures, really.

GasBuddy.com
Find cheap gas prices in your city – became particularly apropos this past year.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Spelling Bee
Sentences That, If Used by Judges in a Spelling Bee, Would Prove Totally Unhelpful to Contestants Attempting to Derive the Meaning of the Word.

Two traveling penguins from Seaworld in San Antonio went through regular airport screening at Denver International Airport
(see above)

A very possible explanation and solution for SIDS
A fungus that commonly grows in (old) bedding can interact with these chemicals added to baby mattresses to create poisonous gases.

year’s best optical illusion
in which the magenta circles eventually disappear from sight (!)

Let’s Go to the Memo – What’s really in the Downing Street memos? By Fred Kaplan
“Two months later, the July 21 Cabinet Office report cited the same worry: ‘A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. … U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point.’ ”

The Excitement Machine: JCPenney Catalog Fall/Winter 1980
Incl. the nike cortez, hook rugs, and the Turtlenecked George W. Bush Doppelganger

flagrantdisregard.com Flickr Toys
A (growing) abundance of well-done and free tools to use with flickr.

Annual Credit Reports, at no charge
Free. Get some.

Rove at War
“In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam.”

Special day at the park | ajc.com – the Carays and father-son relationships
“You could say, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’ But there may not be a tomorrow.”

Scientific American.com: Drowning New Orleans
from 2001: “only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city”

The Tattered Coat: The Shining, Redux
You’ve probably seen it, but still – the feel-good trailer of the year.

Weird and wonderful vocabulary from around the world
de Boinod first became entranced by language when he discovered 27 words for “moustache” in an Albanian dictionary.

I want to
a page of free utilities that help you do stuff you want to – a pretty complete ref for the best of online tools.

Who is Dick Cheney kidding?
“Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not “fabricated,” which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of “lying,” is a straw man of Cheney’s.”

Who They Are – The double standard that underlies our torture policies
“This legal sleight of hand allows the president to insist repeatedly that he does not condone torture and acts only in accordance with the law, while simultaneously dispatching the vice president to Congress to preserve the loophole that allows the infliction of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment on foreign suspects abroad.”

Flickr: The Best Word Book Ever, changes from 1963 to 1991
Sure Dad’s in the kitchen now, but at what cost? No pretty stewardess, no jumping gentleman?

YouTube – SNL – The Chronic of Narnia Rap
Maybe the best, for last.