Ian Rankin, the Scottish mystery author, is pushing to have more books published in Braille. Incidentally, this week marks the 200th birthday of Braille’s inventor, Louis Braille.

It’s great that high-profile authors like Rankin are bringing attention to the woeful shortage of books printed in Braille, but I wonder if the format will still exist in a couple decades. With a few more interface tweaks, devices like the Kindle could read text to the user at any desired speed. Smartphones could also be modified to the task, when they aren’t reading street signs or serving as GPS locators. I could be missing something, but Braille doesn’t have a whole cultural milieu built around it, as we see with American Sign Language. Braille exists as a purely written form of communication developed within the confines of 19th-century technology. Once technology makes print universally accessible via optical character recognition and speech output, will Braille still have a following? We should also ask where the deafblind community stands on this.

The BBC just announced the identity of the actor who will play the eleventh incarnation of the good Doctor. I’ve never heard of him and, apparently, neither have most Brits. I was kind of hoping they’d pick Chiwetel Ejiofor, the guy who played the badass assassin in Serenity, but I’m sure this new guy will work out fine. After all, I had never heard of David Tennant before he took over the role.

On a related note, fans of Battlestar Galactica might want to check out the series of mini-episodes running here as a prelude to the final batch of full episodes. It’s got all kinds of interesting themes. Drug abuse. Bisexuality. And yes, even disability. The only thing missing is Six in a smoking red dress.

I slept in this morning after staying up quite late last night. As some of you already know, sleeping in is one of my favorite decadent activities. Now I discover that there’s scientific evidence to support the sensibility of my decadence. According to studies, night owls are more creative (if you need further evidence, just check out the wittylate-evening posts on my blog. There’s at least a couple.). Getting up early also increases stress hormones, a fact I’m sure to be reminded of as I’m sitting bleary-eyed in the shower tomorrow morning.

The fire alarms in my building are going off as I write this, but that isn’t going to stop me from fulfilling that most sacred blogging tradition: the end-of-year list:

Best Movie I Saw: WALL-E  Pixar’s tale of a solitary robot living among the ruins of an abandoned, ecologically wrecked Earth is dazzling in both visual and narrative terms. The artists manage the impressive feat of using ordinary objects, like a fire extinguisher, to create moving scenes of beauty. WALL-E’s lonely existence, and his inability to fully recognize that loneliness until someone shiny and elegant comes along and captures his attention, is a well-worn theme. But the best movies make those themes feel fresh and relevant.

Best Album I Heard: In Ghost Colors by Cut Copy  Is it electronica? Electro-pop? Whatever you call it, these candy-glazed tracks finally make melancholy something you can dance to. Whenever I was in need of a mood boost, I blasted this album through my speakers or earphones. St. John’s wort has nothing on these lads from Australia.

Best Book I Read: Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr. The Nazis have been fed through the pop culture recycler so many times that they’ve become generic bad guys robbed of historical context. Kerr’s triptych of detective stories set against the rise and fall of the Third Reich are entertaining and tightly plotted, but he never allows the reader to forget that Hitler and his lieutenants are the true criminals. The corrupt moral universe of Kerr’s Berlin brings into relief the basic decency of Bernie Gunther, the flawed and cynical protagonist.

Best TV Show I Watched: The 2008 Presidential Election  I mean, it had everything. The ornery war hero. The fresh-faced senator. Plumbers named Joe. The milf-y governor. It was like a really long season of Survivor, only with more mud and less dignity. And at the end, we all had the opportunity to vote.

Despite the absurd overuse of the word, 2008 really was a year of change for me. I hope 2009 brings you good things. And as always, thanks for letting me waste your time.

To the person who did a search on my blog for “sex” and “massage”: I’m not sure what you were hoping to find, but I’m willing to bet you left disappointed. Unless talk of fishnet stockings gets you all hot and bothered, you’re not going to discover anything here to get excited about. But keep checking in. You never know what will be the subject of my next post.