The new year draws nigh. Around here, that predominantly means one thing. It means we seek your nominations for MISCmedia’s 25th Annual In/Out List, North America’s most accurate predictor of future trends (in a vast array of categories). Tell us your forecasts of what will become hot and not-so-hot within the next 12 months. (Not merely what’s hot and not-so-hot right now.)

Now, in random-linkland:

• Knute Berger has kind words for Lorraine McConaghy’s new Wash. state history tome New Land, North of the Columbia. McConaghy bases her tales on verbatim documents of the periods she explores. This gives her book a real “you are there” feeling, and brings to life events and historical figures which have often been laden with Edwardian creakiness (an image promoted, in many cases, by the historical figures themselves).
• Someone’s put together a list of every all ages show ever held at the long-since demolished RKCNDY club on Yale Avenue from 1996 to 1999. (RKCNDY had previously been a 21-and-over venue since 1991; its site now holds the SpringHill Suites hotel.)
• Charles P. Pierce at Esquire looks at one of this election cycle’s wannabe Third Parties and asks what’s the whole point, if it just gives us yet another champion of the billionaires? (Note that even Esquire, one of those magazines that always points with pride to its advertiser-friendly “upscale” readership, now finds the need to jump on the class-struggle bandwagon. This is actually a sign that the message is getting through.)
• On a similar note, George Monbiot explains better than I can how corporate “libertarian” ideology extols the name of “freedom” as it seeks to make almost all of us much less free. (“Freedom Is Slavery,” indeed.)
• For your listening pleasure, here’s Teutonic punk priestess Nina Hagen in her early years, when she was expected to conform to East German aesthetic as well as ideological strictures.
• If you still yearn for the holiday spirit that never was, relive the fantasy in old Christmas catalogs.