Tim League discusses the origins and growth of the Alamo Drafthouse

Tim League recently spoke to Google about the origins and growth of the Alamo Drafthouse. Lots of failure before success. (The Mondo poster series gets a brief mention 33 minutes in.) Via.

*Buy Mondo posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Abandoned Chinese Disneyworld.

2. If you want to feel nauseous about the economy...

3. Great article about the search for rare earth elements in Alaska (add some super-smart bears and you have a Michael Crichton novel). A taste:

Dotson explained how he’d joined the first landing party as a surveyor to stake the mineral claims on Bokan in 1955. One of the geologists, Don Ross, of the Ross-Adams mine, had found the deposit by dangling a radiation detector outside the window of a tiny Piper Cub propeller plane while he skimmed the peaks of Prince of Wales Island.

4. And from the same issue of Businessweek, read about Amy Jo Martin, the woman behind Shaq's (and other athletes) success on Twitter:

At one point, in October of last year, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter were related to her clients. The two-year-old company does in the “mid-seven figures” in annual billings, which are up 525 percent in 2011. Martin has done so well with teams and athletes that Digital Royalty picked up companies such as DoubleTree and Discount Tire Centers; non-sport clients now make up 70 percent of the business. She employs 15 people (mostly young, mostly women, mostly pretty) and is looking to hire at least five more.

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.

Link roundup

1. Here's a good design idea from Bill Simmons's article about a theoretical new basketball league: create logos for the teams the Seattle Nirvana and the Baltimore Wire.

2. Lots of clever costume ideas.

3. From a long interview with Peter Thiel:

The Warren Buffet rhetorical point is his $34 billion investment in late 2009 in a railway, the single biggest investment by Berkshire Hathaway outside of finance. It is an all-out bet against clean tech. It was described as a bet on America, but 40 percent of what gets transported on railroads is coal. You have to look at Buffett's railroad investments as an all-out bet that clean tech is going to fail.

It's a bet that we're going to send coal to ships in Long Beach and send it to China to power Chinese factories to send us stuff. That's not the clean-tech vision of the 21st century.

4. The latest 20-70% off sale at Things from another world.

5. And speaking of sales, free Dunny if you spend $20 at Tenacious Toys.