Preserving Old Movies

David Pogue weblog thread on preserving old movies. Interesting: New Gold DVDs for archival storage.

Entertaining videos: babies (this won $250,000 on America’s Funniest Home Video).

funny clips for children (a grabbag).

Vintage David Letterman clips. My fave: David answers viewer mail personally (Warning: 13 MB file!).
Some of the classic clips are on YouTube. (Here’s his Velcro man).

Clive Thompson realizes that an article he wrote inspired a programmer to create the YouTube company. (Now that’s a legacy!):

Karim says that when he read this, he immediately realized there was a huge market for a simple tool that unleashed “clip culture” and allowed people to easily post 3-minute video segments online. YouTube was born from his epiphany! If you watch the video of Karim’s speech — posted, naturally enough, on YouTube — you can see his discussion of my article begin at the 26-minute mark. That’s a screenshot of his PowerPoint presentation above.

I am, of course, thrilled to have been responsible in some small way for the extreme goodness that is YouTube. Though I’m probably not as thrilled as I’d be if — as my friends now joke — I’d actually had the idea for YouTube myself, heh. Then again, if I had developed YouTube and sold it to Google for, like, $380 trillion or whatever the heck it sold for, would I be sitting here blogging? Or would my personal army of nuclear-powered robots be sitting here blogging?

Speaking of comedy, Historian Sean Wilentz calls George W. the worst president in history. Wait, Others disagree.