"Tin, the 50th element"

I wish I could see this ballet (link courtesy of the always excellent Dave Lull). More details on the piece (based on Oliver Sacks' Awakenings) here - the videos are well worth a look, though it's hard to get a real sense of the Tobias Picker score based on snippets.

Petrol pump

Compulsive swearing - in sign language. (Via The Dizzies.)

NB Personal Days has been getting some great end-of-the-year attention, including a prominent spot on Time's top ten novels of 2008 list (I cannot use the expression "fiction books," sorry - I guess they use it to cover stories as well as novels - "fictions" would not be quite accurate either - but still, it is almost as bad as "fiction novels"!) and on Edward Champion's also.

I am not going to write a top ten, since I seem to have read very few books this year, but if I have a quiet moment over the weekend I'll skim back through this year's blog posts and put up some holiday book recommendations of one kind or another.