All right. I’ve overcome the gastro virus my little nephew handed the whole family for Xmas, flew half around the globe and am in the process of setting up life back home in Switzerland. First off I have to recommend a fantastic book that I’m reading right now:

Soon I Will Be Invincible, a novel by Austin Grossman

Doctor Impossible—evil genius, diabolical scientist, wannabe world dominator—languishes in a federal detention facility. He’s lost his freedom, his girlfriend, and his hidden island fortress.  Over the years he’s tried to take over the world in every way imaginable: doomsday devices of all varieties (nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological) and mass mind control. He’s traveled backwards in time to change history, forward in time to escape it. He’s commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasions. All failures. But not this time. This time it’s going to be different…

Now the links:

• How to avoid looking like an American tourist
• AdWeek’s top media & marketing innovations of 2008
• A video of a great white shark circling kayakers in Sydney’s northern beaches
• Jalopnik’s top ten car lists of 2008
• BusinessWeek article on recent discussions around the ethics of pay-per-post blogging
• Vertor - verified torrents (of course you shouldn’t use this technology for pirating copyrighted materials but you knew that already, right?)
• One year in 40 seconds (of a bunch of trees that is)
• Bomb explodes under lake (would have been a good surf)
• Cityrag’s celebrity plastic surgery overview of 2008
• 50 inspiring vintage advertisements
• Ebooks hit mobile phones
• LiveLeak vids of a laptop sale frenzy in Russia and a very lucky forklift operator
• A video of Russian talking turkeys
• Last and least Donatella Versace in a bikini (trust me you don’t want to click this link)

One to print and wall in your office. Created by Future Exploration Network’s chief futurist Richard Watson. High-res PDF and also the previous editions are available at nowandnext.com.

The journo is probably on his way to Guantanamo.

• Time has the top 10 everything of 2008 and Google lets you look through their Zeitgeist into the search highlights of the year
• China inevitably also starts to feel the heat with negative growth for the first time in many years
• BusinessWeek on what Microsoft has to fix with Windows Mobile
• AskMen’s top 10 reasons women can’t drive
• Post about Nike’s recent success and the relation to their social network Nike+
• 84% of consumers say corporate blogs suck
• MediaFuturist has 10 quick ways to reinvent print media
• Jerry Yang’s internal memo about the Yahoo layoffs
• Austrian research shows that the absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs
• FreelanceSwitch has 17 tips to overcame a business downturn
• India is not happy about a fake life-sized Taj Mahal, built for a movie
• Did you notice the moon was bigger and brighter the last couple of days?
• Last but not least Russian Xenia Suchinowa is the new Miss World and the original 1950s pin-up model Bettie Page died in LA at 85

Not bad but still looks fake.

‘The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.’ -Albert Einstein 1954