It’s not Thanksgiving Day, and that’s a good enough reason me for to post a link to William S. Burroughs’s Thanksgiving Prayer; here’s a Fonts.com post about one of my many pet hates; and I find it hard to come to grips with the fact that it’s more than 20 years since William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published. Perhaps because I didn’t read it until the early 1990s. Gibson is the man to blame for the term ‘cyberspace’. In this Guardian interview he explains what he’s doing these days, now that he thinks “it is silly to try to imagine futures”.

As usual, Stephen’s lolly-count puts the rest of us to shame. He has lollies about Brits versus Germans; a rare sports lolly: a “short story” by the astonishing Mrs Smith; Stephen’s Dilbert choice is perhaps aimed at Day-Job Rob — and if it isn’t it should be; a fascinating article about record label boss Jonny Trunk’s search for lost classics; a Times piece about a new form of online talent show with dubious merits; Richard Dawkins has a new book, which the same paper calls a “hilarious onslaught” on gullibility.

Mr Stratford likes this piece about unusual restaurants around the world (via Marginal Revolution), which includes photos of some of the establishments. But although I’m keen, for personal reasons, to dine at the Cairo restaurant where all the staff are dwarfs, and at Unsicht-Bar (a play on “invisible” in German), where you eat in the dark served by blind waiters, I really have to wonder about Sehnsucht (“yearning”), a Berlin restaurant for anorexics that went out of business. Never mind, here’s an economist’s strategy for finding good cheap restaurants, which can be summarised as eating in low-rent neighbourhoods; a “piece of work” by Australian book store chain Angus and Robertson, which threatens to turn it into the book world’s equivalent of Monty Python’s cheese shop; and more on this story, which came as a shock to many small publishers. It’s all right, says Stephen, Tim Worstall isn’t talking about NZBC in this post about not having anything interesting to say.

Here we have the “10 Most Awesome Movies Hollywood Ever Killed”:

“This film will always be the weird girl at the book store, the enigmatic one who listens only to bands you’ve never heard of and who just rolls her eyes when you try to make a joke. Hollywood doesn’t need that girl, not with a line of slutty cheerleaders right behind her.”

Some unbelievable pavement art (how long do these take to complete?), also via Marginal Revolution; and a clever little doo-hickey that tells you what was number one on the day you were born (hat-tip Tim Worstall); some Serious Research, supported by Massive Attack, Sigur Rós and the Mountain Goats, around the overblown impact on CD sales from file downloads, hat-tip to the Atlantic; and finally, even though the joke swiftly pales, we enjoyed this little vid about what business meetings would look like if they were run like a blog.

Yes, everything is healing nicely.

“Joyce Carol Oates discusses his novel The Falls with John Mullan at the Guardian book club.”

I wonder whether Mr Mullan was sharp enough to spot that she is really a bloke dressed up.

These venerable gentlemen are the Strawbs. I’ve been listening to their music since I was 12. They’ve just played at Cropredy, the 40th anniversary of the annual UK folk festival organised by Fairport Convention and the various offshoots of that band. Although the Strawbs have been around even longer than Fairport, and the late Sandy Denny was once a member of both bands, amazingly this is the first time the Strawbs have ever appeared at the festival. This photo is courtesy of Dick Greener, who runs the band’s official website. The Cropredy lineup was, in my opinion, the classic one: the band that made Hero and Heroine (Cousins, Lambert, Cronk, Hawken, Coombes) and, by all accounts, they put in a “barnstorming” performance, performing songs such as ‘Lay Down’, ‘New World’ and ‘Ghosts’.