The Museum of Modern Art is taking away its Film Stills Archive. Articles on the subject from New York Newsday, The Village Voice and Time. Plus an audio interview with Mary Corliss, the collection’s longtime caretaker who was laid-off by the museum management.

In the same vein as Atari-nostalgia: there’s quite a number of Lego curiosities to be found on the Web, some of it head-shakingly pointless and some of it mildly amusing. This one is amazing though: a Michel Gondry-directed video for The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” that’s animated completely with Lego blocks. A great video for a great song from a really good band.

Atari is going to live forever. At least in the hearts and minds of Eighties kids who continue to fetishize everything associated with that videogame pioneer. Case in point: these lovely and sometimes brilliantly optimistic conceptual drawings from Atari’s arcade division. I defy anyone who attended high school at any time during the Eighties to remain unimpressed by them. Jeez, I sound so old.

Given the films he’s made lately, it would be hard to blame anyone for giving up on director Robert Altman. But his latest, “Gosford Park,” is assured and deftly-made enough to reaffirm his reputation as one of the greats, and certainly as the master of nuanced ensemble pieces. In fact, “Gosford Park” is a complete delight, as comic and touching as any film from the past few years, and filled with terrific, minutiae-filled performances from some formidable performers.

I got an invoice from domain registrar VeriSign (formerly Network Solutions) to renew Subtraction.com. The invoice reads: “Amount Due: $70.00 US Dollars.” It makes no mention of the fact that a one-year renewal costs US$35, and that really only one year is due — which to me adds up to a kind of dishonesty. So I’m giving Capital Networks’s TotalNICa try. They’re an ICANN-approved registrar that will allow me to transfer my registration for just US$9.95 for two years.

Blogger Pro has been released, with plenty of additional (if not ground-breaking) features.

Honda has some really nice new footage of its robots, which walk so convincingly, you’d swear you were just watching some guy in a funny astronaut suit. That’s how far technology has come.

This is probably what Jakob Nielsen meant when he said that Flash is 99% bad: a bizarrely pointless, Flash-animated game (I use that term loosely) featuring supermodel Eva Herzigova.

In an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” New York Times investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald comments on the Enron debacle:“Basically what I write about is corporate scandal and I have noticed time and again, you have the same underlying themes in almost every scandal. First, a group of executives who believe they are changing the world. Second, a level of arrogance and a level of greed that you don’t see in other corporations. Third and probably most significant — lack of adequate compliance procedures.”

Robert Scoble has notes from the Blogger Pro demonstration given by Evan Williams at last night’s Weblogger Interest Group. When it’s launched, I believe more information will be available at pro.blogger.com.

My cable modem service cut out inexplicably this afternoon. A call to tech support yielded no answers, only the broad solution of scheduling a service call for next Thursday — nearly forty-eight hours later. Thankfully, the connection came up half an hour ago, again inexplicably. Having it gone for even just a few hours drives home the fact that I’ve become totally reliant on this service.

This 1976 lecture by Massimo Vignelli to a group of designers employed by the Federal Government is a treasure trove of insight. Apparently, Vignelli was brought in to proselytize his nearly-religious belief in the grid as a central design philosophy, and walks his audience through some of his most beautifully realized grid systems.Unexpectedly, this page is hosted by the US Geological Survey, which also maintains a small but informative collection of other design resources. There’s some good stuff here, including Philip B. Meggs’s searing critique of NASA’s reversion to its old “meatball” logo.

Dave Winer is gunning for the role of patron saint of Web loggers. Not only is he the author of one of the longest-running Web logs out there, but he’s also the guiding light behind UserLand Software. A scrappy publisher of content management tools like Manila, UserLand seems dedicated to the idea of bringing the power of database-driven Web publishing to the masses. Their latest release takes them a signficant step closer to this goal; Radio Userland looks like a remarkably capable personal publishing tool priced at the ridiculously reasonable rate of US$40 per copy. Bravo. I hope to find some time to download and try the 30-day free demo soon, and perhaps if all goes well, Subtraction.com will move over to Radio.

After eight years of Republican-fueled persecution, I’m trying not to gloat at the way the tangled web of Enron’s collapse has found its way into the White House. I admit too that it doesn’t seem likely that the Bush adminstration did anything improper. It’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess. Also, who designed that awful Enron logo?

More Mac stuff. Over the holidays I took a day out to reformat and partition my PowerBook G4 and installed Mac OS X 10.1. I had a good time playing around with the Aqua interface, and steeping myself in the Mac OS X user community’s hubs and blogs, but that’s about as far as it’s come. 10.1 may be an improvement over 10.0, but it’s still not quite ready for prime time. There are too many missing applications, utilities and feature gaps. When I tried to play a DVD on my television via an S-video cable, for example, Mac OS X refused.Right now what it has to offer just isn’t compelling enough for me to boot it up very often, though I’m trying to remain optimistic about it. The foundation is quite impressive, and with some polishing it could be a first rate OS experience. But what’s most disappointing is that after all this time, Mac fans still have to wait even longer for a servicable, fully functional, modern operating system.

A little late, but I’m really impressed by the new iMac, which is such a refreshing design that it’s easily my favorite piece of Mac hardware in recent memory. The swivel arm is a deceptively simple breakthrough — its quiet shattering of the most basic of computing ergonomics will have far-reaching influence, I predict.In some ways, the new iMac trumps even the legions of hypothetical Mac designs posted by fans at sites likeThe Apple Collection and the Japanese Applele.

Things have been very hectic but I look at that as a good thing, actually. 2002 is bound to be a way better year than its predecessor, or at least I’m hoping as much. Things at Behavior are starting to gain steam, and the mood of just about everyone I know is markedly better than last year. At any rate, I’m back to posting here regularly.

Did you ever wonder what “Lorem ipsum” means? Cecil Adams explains.

Happy new year, belatedly. I spent the holidays doing holiday-ish stuff, and also dealing with a series of system troubles that have been nagging at me, like a non-functioning CD-ROM drive on my VAIO and a continually mis-aligned screen on my Palm Vx. A week or so ago, I took advantage of the relative quiet to reformat my PowerBook G4 and install Mac OS X 10.1, which I’ve been playing with since. It’s fun, though there are some that would argue otherwise. In any event, I'm looking forward to 2002 being a heck of a lot better than 2001.