Link roundup

1. Penny Arcade's business manager participated in an interview at Reddit.

2. Deadspin's picks for the top 10 sports articles of the year.

3. Teddy Roosevelt once gave possibly the best start to a speech ever:

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.

He wasn't joking.

4. The Smithsonian's top 10 science blog posts.

Link roundup

1. T-Bob Hebert and Spiffy Evans - - two players on Grantland's 2011-12 College Football All-Name Team.

2. I enjoyed the copy of Lady with a Past: A Petulant French Sculptor, His Quest for Immortality, and the Real Story of the Statue of Liberty I was sent. Lots of interesting information about the building of the Statue of Liberty. For example, sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi devised the Statue of Liberty only after he tried and failed to convince "Ismail the Magnificent" of Egypt to build a rather different statue in Egypt:

His sculpture depicted a robed fellah, an Egyptian slave, holding a torch aloft in her stout hand.

The Kindle single is $2 at Amazon.

3. Comment and win an art book.

Link roundup

1. "One of the first American chefs to master French cooking was James Hemings, who just so happened to be Thomas Jefferson’s slave."

2. There has to be some crucial fact left out of this story by Business Week, right?

Fiat’s 22,000 factory workers in Italy assembled 650,000 cars in 2009, while the 6,100 employees at its plant in Tychy, Poland, built 600,000 vehicles.

3. Myke Amend's basically running his own kickstarter with prizes including high-res downloads of his airships, and holiday cards.

Illustration roundup

Doesn't really work as a t-shirt, but I like this illustration by Becky Cloonan for Threadless (one of the new comic book-inspired designs).



Relatedly, Shadows of the Colossus wallpaper. Via.



Paul Revere/Tron mashup by Jason Heuser on sale at Etsy.



Cover by Travis Coburn for Ian Fleming's Commandos.



Kali Ciesemier.



Jack Hughes.

*Buy James Bond posters at Amazon.

Art project dedicated to American history

A few of my favorites from the large and ongoing Momentus Project, dedicated to American history:


The Boston Massacre by Chris DeLorenzo.



The Declaration of Independence by Ellis Latham-Brown.



The Battle of Antietam by Glenn Thomas.



The Women's Suffrage Movement by Kristina Collantes.



The Watergate Scandal by Shed Labs.

*Buy propaganda posters at eBay.

Original plan for Mount Rushmore

Wikipedia says:

A model at the site depicting Mount Rushmore's intended final design. Insufficient funding forced the carving to end in October 1941.

Via.