029: Warm woolen mittens

Favorite things from this week:

The Space Age: NASA's Story
Oddly, it was the BBC that made this fascinating look inside the U.S. space program.  PBS has shown the first two parts, with the next two presumably airing over the next couple weeks.  I never really studied NASA's history, either in school or on my own, so I missed out on some really interesting stories about the early days of the space race.  The "newly restored" footage from the era, including high-speed shots from around the launch pad (which any Mythbusters fan can tell you is always impressive), is fantastic, as are the interviews with retired astronauts and people who worked in Mission Control from NASA's first days.  Fascinating, entertaining, definitely worth checking out.

Rides a Bike
Best tumblr find this week.  Do you like classic films?  Do you like bicycles?  Do you like pictures of classic film stars riding bicycles?  Then I have the site for you!  I can't wait to get my bike out in the spring, but until then, I'll use the giant 1980s stationary bike in our family room and look at pictures of attractive people enjoying their velocipedes.

Black Swan
I finally saw it, and it was INSANE.  In a good way!  There was a freaky ambience to the whole film that made me very, very nervous throughout, and any film that can get that kind of reaction from me gets a thumbs-up.  It was also the best performance I've seen from Natalie Portman in quite a while.

Book bars

Library Bar in Downtown LA

A few in L.A. are featured in this article, all of which I will frequent if I ever find myself living there.  As far as I know, there aren't any similar places in the Twin Cities, unfortunately.  My friends and I used to frequent Kieran's in Minneapolis when we were in college, and we had dinner at their new First Ave location when everybody was in town during the holidays.  I can only imagine we would have lived at a book bar, which would have been great for our love for literature, but very bad for our wallets (and livers).

This tweet

Very important things are going on in Egypt right now, but amongst the protests and, unfortunately, violence, it's heartening to see that it isn't all about destruction.