Help with corporate theme bottombar – how to add recent posts

For some reason the bit of code I posted caused some formatting in my question above – not sure how to avoid that, new here . . . just saw the node about putting code into backticks

<h2 class="bottombartitle"><?php _e('Recent Comments'); ?></h2>
	    <?php
		global $comment;
		if ( $comments = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved='1' ORDER BY comment_date_gmt
		DESC LIMIT 5") ) :
		?>	

		<ul class="list-archives">
			<?php
			foreach ($comments as $comment) {
				echo '<li><a href="'. get_permalink($comment->comment_post_ID) . '#comment-' . $comment->comment_ID . '"><font color="#222222">' . sprintf('%s...', substr(strip_tags($comment->comment_content), 0, 80)).'</font><br />'.get_comment_author($comment->comment_post_ID).'</a>';
			echo '</li>';
			}
			?>
		</ul>

<h2 class="bottombartitle"><?php _e('Recent Posts'); ?></h2>
<?php
query_posts('showposts=5');
if(have_posts()) :
?>
<ul class="list-archives">
<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
  <li><?php the_permalink(); ?></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>
<?php
endif;
wp_reset_query();
?>

That almost worked – but the recent post title looks like a link (but is not a link) – you can see it here

oh, use
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
instead of
<li><?php the_permalink(); ?></li>

excellent, that worked – thanks!