01. Detroit: Bentley Continental GT V8 brings the motor to Motor City

“Bentley has at last debuted its latest beast at the 2012 Detroit Auto Show. The Continental GT V8 arrived in the Motor City boasting a new compact 4.0-liter, twin-turbocharged V8 under its hood. With 500 horsepower and 481 pound-feet of torque on tap, the ultra-luxury coupe offers buyers heaps of performance in an efficient package. Well, efficient by Bentley standards, anyway. The company says the Continental GT V8 has an effective range of 500 miles, which translates to roughly 21 mpg. That’s not a Prius-besting figure by any stretch, but it’s far from embarrassing given the globe-spinning amount of power on tap.” (autoblog)

02. Audi Q3 Vail

“This week Audi reveals the new Q3 Vail SUV at the Detroit Auto Show. The new theme for the smallest SUV in the Audi line-up comes with a powerful 314 hp engine, special Energy Red colorway, a new interior material and all sorts of other features on the interior and exterior, that make it a sporty car for the mountains. Made for the ski and snowboard enthusiasts, the sporty appeal mixed with outdoor functionality, make the Audi Q3 Vail an interesting contender in the category.” (highsnobiety)

03. 2013 Ford Fusion

“Let’s get it out of the way. There’s an undeniably Aston Martin aura about the all-new 2013 Ford Fusion. And rights (or rites) of design or not, we reckon it’s been a while since anyone’s spoken that highly about a mid-size Ford sedan. At least not here in the U.S. and perhaps going all the way back to the long gone, but much beloved, and potent Ford Taurus SHO.” (gearpatrol)

04. Geekhouse Bikes New 25,000 sf Co-Working Space and headquarters in Boston

“Makers, manufacturers, artists, photographers, graphic designers, programers, if you are the kind of person who is making something we are looking for you. HQ Boston is the premiere location in Boston for small to medium scale manufacturing. We have tens of thousands of square feet of space ready to be turned into your next workshop, studio, or work space.” (vimeo)

01. inaugural ‘Martyrdoom’ fest hits Brooklyn this summer (lineup)

“Signature Riff, BrooklynVegan, Order of The Serpent, and Catharsis PR are proud to announce the inaugural Martyrdoom fest! The two-stage Brooklyn metal extravaganza will feature exclusive area performances from Dead Congregation (Greece), Grave Miasma (United Kingdom) and Cruciamentum (United Kingdom), along with rare appearances from names like Sanguis Imperem (California), Kommandant (Illinois), Prosanctus Inferi (Ohio), Anu (North Carolina), Encoffination (Georgia / California), Father Befouled (Georgia / California), Perdition Temple (Florida), and Evoken (New Jersey), and will go down across two stages at Public Assembly on June 30th. Tickets are on sale NOW and will set you back $20 in advance and $27 at the door.” (brooklynvegan)

02. VIDEO/MP3: Trevor Jackson’s ‘Metal Dance’ Mix of Post-Punk

“Check out a free MP3 version of Trevor Jackson’s Metal Dance mini-mix below, alongside a complete tracklisting of the producer’s killer two-disc compilation of post-punk, industrial and EBM, which hits shops on February 21st through Strut… (self-titled)

03. 2011 In Punk & Hardcore: A Review

“No, I’m gonna say it before you have a chance: looking back at what happened in punk and hardcore in a calendar year, and squishing it all into one rambling column, is kind of a bogus activity. It endorses an inappropriately neat culture of compartmentalisation, and ignores the fact that nearly all underground punk records come out when they’re ready and/or the label can afford to press them, rather than to maximalise its market performance or what have you. And yet there are trends in punk and hardcore, ones which create recognisable aesthetic shifts…” (thequietus)

04. 10 Classic Albums Released 10 Years Into A Band’s Career

“It’s a new year, and every Thursday, we’re going to be publishing a new list in this space. You guys like lists, right? Good! For our first one, we got to talking about Guided By Voices, who just released a pretty great album about 25 years after their first one. And that raised the question: How many artists are capable of releasing a great album a decade after their debut?” (stereogum)

01. Morgan celebrates 75 years of the 4/4 with special anniversary edition

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to? Morgan would beg to differ. Because while 75 years may be a milestone many automakers would be glad to celebrate, this 75th anniversary doesn’t commemorate a company’s founding. Nor does it mark the years since a specific factory was inaugurated, the birth of the company’s founder or anything like that. This milestone is marked by one specific model.” (autoblog)

02. The Dumpster Project

“Like a young, curious boy trapped in a grown man’s body, collagist, animator, director and all-around creative renaissance man Mac Premo has collected a lifetime’s worth of somehow-sentimental objects in his Brooklyn Studio. Now, spurred by the move to a smaller studio, he was forced to get rid of many of these innumerable “treasures.” Rather than discard them Premo decided to build one massive collage inside a 30-yard dumpster, and thus The Dumpster Project was born.” (coolhunting)

03. The Joys of Earthquake-Free Architecture

“Admit it: That’s the most bad-ass conference room you’ve ever seen, and one that you’d never see in California. Designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects and constructed in tectonically-stable Copenhagen, it’s part of Danish bank Nykredit’s headquarters, which features a total of three such rooms cantilevered over the atrium.” (core77)

04. First Look 2012: Oil Tanks Tate Modern

“Plenty to look forward to in 2012 now that we know our mortal reckoning was a small misunderstanding by anthropologists. This week we’ll be looking at a number of London-based happenings starting with the much anticipated regeneration of the Oil Tanks in the Tate Modern’s new annexe designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The ambitious redevelopment will be home to performances and an auditorium and while still under construction, the Tate Modern Project site offers lots of insight into its progress.” (itsnicethat)

01. Kate Bellm (Pictured)

Freunde von Freunden visits another place in Berlin we’d love to live in. (Freunde von Freunden)

02. 2011’s best short stories

“Are these hard times for the short story? Perhaps not so very tough: in his introduction to The Best British Short Stories: 2011 Nicholas Royle mentions the increase in UK-based paper and ink publications regularly publishing short fiction and concludes that “there have been harder times for the short story”, and I think he’s right. In the introduction to the The Granta Book of the African Short Story, meanwhile, Helon Habila notes that across the continent “the internet is today doing what the newspapers and magazines did to the development of the short story in Europe and America at the start of the industrial age”. (Guardian)

03. One Cut

“This is the story of one cut. Back in October 2010 George Osborne announced £95 billion in cuts to public services, saying he’d leave it to councils to choose what to shut down. Inevitably most of the casualties ended up being unrenowned places, unlikely to stir up much protest – drop-in centers in housing estates, inner-city park rangers, community theatres, etc. I wanted to write about just one of them, about the ripples created by a single closure. I made my selection quite randomly. I chose a place called Youthreach. I didn’t know much about them, only that they offered weekly counseling sessions to young people, aged 11–25, in Greenwich, South East London.” (Jon Ronson)

04. 2011 round of year: Kirkland-Angulo

“You’ve heard the term “bull in a china shop,” right? Now imagine if two bulls were actually let loose at the same time in said china shop.

The ensuing destruction would probably look pretty much like the first round of the James Kirkland-Alfredo Angulo fight. Wild, with heavy-duty contact. Violent. Total chaos in a small area. Easily the 2011 ESPN.com round of the year.” (ESPN)

01. Helen Johannesen (Pictured)

Some great tomboy style in here. (Closet Visit)

02. The one guy who can tell Bobcats owner Michael Jordan ‘no’

“Curtis Polk is the most powerful person in the Charlotte Bobcats organization you’ve never heard of.

Only Michael Jordan, the team owner and arguably the best basketball player ever, outranks Polk in authority.

Though Polk works directly for Jordan, rather than the Bobcats, his power within the organization is clear. Here’s how a team executive, who asked to remain anonymous, described Polk’s monthly visits to Charlotte:

“Everyone is answerable to Curtis.” (Charlotte Observer)

03. Bruce Forbes on Christmas History

“Did you know that Santa Claus was a 4th century bishop in what is now Turkey? That Puritans tried to outlaw Christmas? Or Tiny Tim was originally Little Fred? We shed light on Christmas’s pagan past and consumerist present

What exactly is Christmas? It’s certainly not Jesus’s birthday, is it?

There are several surprises that people encounter when they start to learn about Christmas. One is that Jesus probably wasn’t born on the 25th, because we don’t know when his birthday was. Secondly, it’s a surprise for many people that the early Christians did not celebrate Christmas. It took 300 years or so before there was an annual Christian celebration.” (The Browser)

04. Gay Talese, The Art of Nonfiction No. 2

“In order to get to Gay Talese’s study you have to leave his Upper East Side town house and go down the elegantly curling stairs, into another entrance, with another set of keys, and down another flight of steps. The bunker, as he calls it, is a long, narrow room that is bigger than many Manhattan apartments, with a bathroom, shower, kitchen, several couches, two desks, a table and chairs. One does not, however, lose the feeling of being underground. One also has the unmistakable sense of being inside his mind.

There are shelves running up to the ceiling filled with boxes and boxes of files. Each box is elaborately festooned with a collage: photographs from newspapers and magazines, excised words, drawings, cartoons. The files contain notes for all of Talese’s books and articles, clippings, outlines, letters. The collages make the cardboard boxes look whimsical, childlike, flamboyant; there is a joy here that most of us can’t muster for file keeping.” (The Paris Review)

Happy Hanukkah and Christmas from all of ours to yours.

01. Spent reunited for night 2 of Yo La Tengo’s Hanukkah party
“Looks like Mac McCaughan (of Superchunk, Portastatic and Merge Records) had more than one reason (so far) for spending Hanukkah in Hoboken with Yo La Tengo again this year. His old friends Spent, who reunited in 2009 for Merge’s 20th Anniversary, were the openers for Yo La Tengo on Wednesday (the second night of Hanukkah), along with comedians Bobcat Goldthwait (!) and Neil Innes (!). Smokey Hormel is guest YLT guitarist.” (brooklynvegan)

02. Family Takes Clever Christmas Card Photo

“It’s never too early to start thinking about how to send your well-wishes over the holidays, and what better strategy than the funny family photo? Granted, they’re difficult to pull off, but just use this family’s perfect 10 as a guide and you’ll be on the right track.” (huffpo>reddit)

03. Cookie recipes for Christmas or any day

“So I’ve set myself a challenge. Over the next year, I’m going to learn how to bake. And I’m going to learn from my Grammy. I haven’t decided exactly how thoroughly I’m going to publicly document this process, but, suffice to say, a few of the recipes that work out particularly well are definitely going to end up here on BoingBoing. To kick things off, I’m starting with three cookie recipes that I baked for the first time yesterday and today—Cowboy Cookies (oatmeal-nut-chocolate chip cookies); Pumpkin-Nut Cookies; and Jam Thumbprint Tarts. ” (boing)

01. The Man who slipped on the ice (above)

We do like a faux-documentary.

02. Ajax and AZ Alkmaar match abandoned after goalkeeper kicks fan

“An Ajax supporter ran on to the field and tried to attack the goalkeeper of visiting AZ Alkmaar in a Dutch cup match on Wednesday, leading to the game being suspended after just 36 minutes.

The fan, identified by Ajax as a 19-year-old who had been drinking, approached Alkmaar’s Esteban Alvarado from behind, but the Costa Rican keeper saw the supporter in time and skillfully tripped him. Alvarado then kicked him twice where he lay before stewards dragged the intruder off the pitch.” (Guardian)

03. Marilyn Chewed Up

“Art book publisher TASCHEN recently released a new collector’s edition book on Marilyn Monroe, featuring the original text from Norman Mailer’s 1973 biography and accompanied by Bert Stern’s photographs, some of which were taken just six weeks before Monroe’s death.

The 278 page tome, simply entitled “Norman Mailer, Bert Stern: Marilyn Monroe” initially seems promising. A coffee table book the size of a small coffee table itself, it is selling briskly, despite the 750 Euro price tag (the editions signed by Stern, selling for 1,500 Euro, have apparently sold out). Many of the photos, some of them the last ones ever taken of the actress, are quite beautiful, presenting a nude Monroe veiled in a diaphanous pink scarf; Marilyn cheekily playing dress up as Jackie O; or playfully hiding her breasts with cabbage roses. Yet closer inspection of the book is quite disturbing, and reveals a dated attitude towards women that would never be permitted today.” (The Genteel)

04. Václav Havel: Outtakes from An Interview

“My first memory of Václav Havel is of watching the news as a kid, after the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and seeing pictures of Havel in his living room: a prison of stuffed bookshelves. For me, Havel was the image of a literary hero—an ideal of literature as integrity.” (The Paris Review)

01. Five minutes with… Matthew Dear

“The former is a collaborative EP that sees Dear working alongside Fever Ray producers Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid, and The Drums’ frontman Jonathan Pierce, while Beams is the full-length follow up to Dear’s acclaimed last album, Black City. As Dear explained to FACT over email, it’s an album with “a bit more hopefulness” than his past work.” (fact)

02. Student Spotlight: Kleenex Desktop Companion

“This project began with a thought to design packaging with designers in mind, so I started to brainstorm for everyday items that could be reimagined and eventually landed upon Kleenex.” (dieline)

03. Corona Beer Board Game

“6 beers and a board game — yet same weight as before. Simply flatten the box into the game, and use your bottle-caps as the game pieces. Dice and game cards are downloaded to your smartphone via scanning the QR code. Only one download is needed for up to 6 people to play. Drink, socialize, and have fun— Corona isn’t just another boring beer company and we’ve got the board to show it.” (potw)

04. Salon by Takara Space Design

“Completed by Tokyo studio Takara Space Design, the three-storey salon joins together two buildings – a former gallery and an old shoe shop.” (dezeen)

01. One last Sunday roast (pictured)

The Blue Hour with a roast that has forced us to raid our cabinets. (The Blue Hour)

02. The Hate List 2011

“In line with Frank Costanza’s Festivus tradition of airing grievances, it’s important to vent to create space for goodwill in time for the Holidays. It’s also the time of the year when everyone’s creating lists of the year’s best lists, so I hopped on the bandwagon as a negativity purge with 10 things I hate at the moment” (Gwarizm)

03. The Iron Giant

“Perhaps a sense of his career being truncated is what keeps Bob Pettit chronically underrated these days. At just 32, the man who served as the first archetype for the prototypical power forward ended his 11-year career as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer with 20,880 points, having become the first to surpass 20,000. But, alas, he was a guy who NBA.com and various encyclopedias list as having no nickname (St. Louis Hawks broadcaster Buddy Blattner dubbed Pettit “Big Blue,” a moniker that not surprisingly failed to catch on) and whose go-to move—pulling larger defenders out to 20 feet with a modest, one-handed jumper—was revolutionary but unexciting. So it’s no surprise that Pettit holds little currency in the present era, when nicknames and signature moves do most of the talking while the game often comes second.” (Slam)

04. 2011 Boxing Knockout of the Year Nominees

“The major categories are Knockout of the Year, Round of the Year, Fight of the Year and Fighter of the Year. The final leg is a pu-pu platter of awards ranging from Trainer of the Year to more frivolous topics.

For each category, I give five finalists, with video and/or relevant info. You tell me if my finalists and honorable mentions are lacking, and give your vote on who you think should win. Maybe you sway me to adjust the list, and maybe you sway me on the eventual winner. On the second day after a category is introduced, I give that winner and explain why. (There are no major fights left in 2011, but we reserve the right to change our category winners if something crazy happens.)

So, up first: Knockout of the Year and Round of the Year candidates. On deck: Knockout of the Year and Round of the Year winners, followed by Fight of the Year and Fighter of the Year candidates.” (Queensbury Rules)

01. The Dark Knight Rises Official Trailer
Sorry, but I needed to post this.

02. 25 People Who Thought Lil Kim Died

Lil Kim and Kim Jung Il Twitter confusion. (buzzfeed)

03. Kim Jong Il: 10 weird facts, propaganda

“During his often oppressive reign over North Korea, Kim Jong Il cultivated a personal mythology that included some outlandish claims. Global Post compiled 10 bizarre bits of reported fact and propaganda from the life of ‘Dear Leader.’”(cbs)

04. As it happened: Kim Jong-il dies

“Hello and welcome to the BBC’s minute-by-minute coverage of events in North Korea, where the death of leader Kim Jong-il has been announced.”(bbc)