December 31

If you want to get truly depressed on this last day of the decade, read this post by the excellent Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, and also the Huffington Post article that he points to:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/29/inside-the-legislative-sausage-factory-banking-committee-edition/

On a much cheerier note, this Facets DVD of the collected animation of Alexandre Alexeieff sounds most interesting:

http://www.ifc.com/news/2009/12/life-in-stop-motion.php?page=2

Also, I have a couple of pleasant blogs to share. If you like photographs of sunny Mexico -- and who wouldn't, especially in mid-winter? -- the photo-blog Jim & Carole's Mexico Adventure is a good bet. No drug lords, just great locations:

http://cookjmex.blogspot.com/

Jabberwock, from the Indian blogger Jai Arjun Singh, offers very companionable observations about literature, film, and other topics, and often alerts me to Indian books and films I would otherwise not have known about:

http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/

Among notables born on this date are painter Henri Matisse, Uruguayan fiction writer Horacio Quiroga, Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, science fiction writer Connie Willis, violinist Nathan Milstein, folksinger Odetta, and a good group of actors -- Sir Anthony Hopkins, Val Kilmer, Bebe Neuwirth, Sarah Miles, Ben Kingsley, and Gong Li. It is nice to remember about Sir Anthony that he was an electrifying performer long, long before The Silence of the Lambs catapulted him to mega-stardom. Some of his best work was on TV in the Seventies: as Pierre in the BBC version of War and Peace, in the American mini-series QB VII, and as the kidnapper Bruno Richard Hauptmann in The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case. A later performance of his that I cherish is as the bookseller Frank Doel opposite Anne Bancroft in 84 Charing Cross Road.