Econlinks

• The Nobel Ig prizes this year. My favourite is the Literature one: "Ireland's police service for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means 'Driving License'". Almost as good as the Nigerian Literature Ig winners a while ago. At the same time, the Economics Ig for '09 is somewhat forced; the whole Icelandic population should have gotten it: as we know, they were all into banking until rather recently.

• Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times with the best piece on the Polanski saga as yet. Everybody else is awfully subjective.

• Guardian's list of where to find the best foods in the world. Room for disagreement, but still worth checking out. Unfortunately, I have recently missed the Barcelona and Tokyo places from the list... Plus a nice exposition of the contemporary American cuisine's highs.

• Somebody stop the Viking... ! More. He drew Leko and (again) Topalov in the latest two games, but he is still two points ahead. Let's hope this partnership with Kasparov (5th bullet point) works out and Carlsen stops losing the end games after dominating for most part all recent major tournaments...

• Goolsbee might indeed be the funniest economist alive, via Greg Mankiw. Of course, this was not unexpected: he'd already excelled on the (in)famous Colbert Report.

• The Dutch to the rescue of Scandinavian small towns?

• Writing from Schiphol, after almost 11 hours return flight from Tokyo. Detailed impressions in due time. Now boarding again.