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I love Calvin & Hobbes . The (unofficial) RSS feed of each day's strip from 11 years back is one of life's pleasures.

Is Stranger than Fiction going to be a good movie? I hope so. If nothing else, when Dustin Hoffman is on the screen I can pretend that I'm watching I (Heart) Huckabees for the eighth time. And they've got Spoon on the soundtrack!

No one will be watching us, after all.

Chimera or well-loved blogger? You decide . I have a great new secret screenname now.

Last night, we had one of the best meals we’ve ever had together at Chestnut , a little neighborhood restaurant on Smith Street. Chestnut is normally on the higher end, but for some glorious reason, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays they offer a $25 prix fixe menu. Any appetizer, any entrée, and any dessert. If you take a quick glance at the menu, that’s like at least $40 worth of food. And, as we soon found out, REALLY AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS food. I’m really still daydreaming about the tastes and textures sitting here at work the next day (so much so that I felt compelled to stop what I was doing to get it all into words). The restaurant is small and cozy, with minimal art on the walls and light wood tables. Everyone, from the bartender to the waitstaff, is superfriendly and warm. We got a good vibe from the moment we walked in. The cocktails: Jeff started off with an Oktoberfest beer; I had a glass of Chardonnay. Soon, the waiter brought out a plate of house-made foccacia, oatmeal raisin bread...

Matthew Continetti is blogging for the Times . Instinctively, I know that this is a step up from blogging for Blogspot (although "blogging for Google" reads better), but I'm not sure why.

Sheryl and I had spent a lovely fall Saturday walking around Brooklyn yesterday–specifically, from Cobble Hill to Prospect Heights. (There are some accompanying pictures .) After walking around Grand Army Plaza, we stopped in the Brooklyn Museum to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibit. It was arty, though I like my snapshots better. We were both starved after the museum and I wanted to try Franny's , which was nearby on Flatbush Ave. The meal was... well, the details of the meal can be found in the below review. The important thing about this review is that I originally wrote it as a post on Chowhound , a genuinely useful foodie bulletin board. Within a few hours after posting the review it was removed from Chowhound, and I got an email from the site's moderators saying that reviews of Franny's were banned from the site due to previous "suspicious" posts. This ban has apparently been in effect since at least January of 2005, based on a comment I found in the archives ...

The Ethicist (if that is his real profession) is a huge buffoon .

( Windows 95 was Chicago , but whatever.) Because I don't know what to do when Sheryl isn't over and I have Warcrafted myself out for the night, I decided to install Windows Vista Preview Release 1 on my Intel iMac under the Parallels virtual machine. The preview release is free (legally) and Parallels has a 15 day demo (though I purchased a license), so you can go out and do this for free. After you've spent a grand and a half on your Intel Mac, that is. The Parallels virtual machine is good, but it can't quite provide direct access to all the acceleration my graphics card offers in the guest operating system. Vista detects this and switches to some not-quite-so-Aero mode. Everything looks meh --not different from the Windows XP screen I sit in front of at work every day. What is very impressive is the performance. You wouldn't think that a bloated operating system would be usuable in a virtual machine with a bunch of crap running in the native operating system, ...