With a gigantic mob of revelers preparing to descend upon Washington for Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20, tickets to the handful of official inaugural balls will be extraordinarily hard to come by. There are usually about 10 or 12 official balls, and they’re organized around groups of states. Barring some sort of magic back-channel connection I haven’t discovered yet, I won’t be suiting up for an Obama ball this year. But I may head down to D.C. anyway, just for the fun.

I was lucky enough to attend presidential inaugural balls in both 1993 and 1997:

In late 1992 I began dating a woman who was working for the Clinton/Gore campaign here in New York. At the beginning of January, the Clinton whirlwind plucked her from Manhattan and deposited her in Washington at a job with the Department of Health and Human Services. A couple of weeks later, I traveled down to D.C. to attend Clinton’s inauguration and one of the presidential inaugural balls, which my girlfriend had scored us tickets to. I think it was the first time I’d ever worn a tux. It was an incredibly exciting 24 hours, heightened by everyone’s glee over the official end of 12 years of Reagan and Bush.

At the beginning of 1997, I was a few months into a yearlong stint at an editing job in D.C. A friend of mine easily scored us tickets to Clinton’s second round of inaugural balls. It wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as 1993, but it was still a swank and memorable night.

The spectacular footage below, which captures a bunch of insane thrill seekers as they zoom around a canyon in webbed flying outfits, is apparently from a 2007 extreme-sports movie called Seven Sunny Days. It won’t be long before a big-budget action movie appropriates this subculture for a chase sequence, just like the Bond franchise did with parkour in Casino Royale. Holy crap, just take a look.

Check out these gorgeous images from the New Scientist site. More of these snowflake photos are here.

Pretty fricking great: This morning Google added dozens of old magazines to its Book Search database. These are scans of entire magazines, ads included. What a trove it is, and I’m sure it’s just the beginning. Here is New York magazine in its earliest glory days:

Now we just gotta get them to add the full run of Spy (the funny years, at least).

John Francis Daley, who played Sam Weir on the world-historically brilliant NBC show Freaks and Geeks almost a decade ago, has had a relatively quiet career since finishing puberty, watching mostly from the sidelines as various F&G cohorts—James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Linda Cardellini, not to mention Judd Apatow and Paul Feig—have reached stardom or near stardom.

Daley has worked occasionally since F&G, including a starring role in the apparently shelved Star Wars-inspired film 5-25-77, which I wrote about in 2005. He’s also done TV work here and there.

It turns out that Daley recently joined the cast of the Fox murder-investigations show Bones. The show seems pretty lame, and it’s not something I’d ever watch. But it’s interesting to see Daley as a young-adult version of the twitchy, sweet, geeky freshman he played on F&G. The first clip below is a short scene from Bones; the second, after the jump, is an interview with Daley on some cheesy entertainment show.

[Continue reading "Freaks and Geeks Status Report: John Francis Daley Now on Bones; Samm Levine Hired by Quentin Tarantino"...]

On a day when the book industry appears to be imploding before our eyes, I’m happy to post this fantastic animated film, which was made to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the British HarperCollins imprint 4th Estate. The film was produced by the London-based design studio Apt, which has been doing lots of terrific work recently.

There’s some behind-the-scenes footage here.

[via Andrew Sullivan.]