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I saw Ze Frank coming out of Starbucks yesterday morning, which isn't too surprising as he lives somewhere in the neighborhood. But I'd never seen him before, and you always remember your first Ze sighting. Sheryl professes not to care for The Show , but I love it . Perhaps even the hatas ( sic my ass, mutha) out there will appreciate today's Scrabble episode .

Little Children was altogether unpleasant. I have a semi-unjustified bias against Tom Perrotta after reading the meh-inspiring Joe College (which Amazon helpfully subtitles as "A Novel"). Sheryl, however, read Little Children and was all excited about the film. So we had to see it. I have been trying to get Sheryl to blog about how poor it was as restitution, but she never got around to it. Thankfully, Ben has picked up the slack . To pile on another representative anecdote about how this was clearly not a movie, Jennifer Connelly was paid money to be in the film (presumably; I hope), and yet she's only in one of every dozen scenes or so. If that's not gross negligence in filmmaking, I don't know what is. I probably shouldn't take the baton from Ben and get started with my thoughts on David Denby. Well, just one: for not particularly complicated but purposefully mysterious reasons, I've slept in the same bed as David Denby. (No, not at the same time. Se...

Scotter (whom I miss more than I care to admit and who refuses to read 34 , ever) was in from Seattle for a few days for the holiday. I met up with him at Penn Station last evening and we walked around the city for five hours before he had to head back to Long Island. Constituting the least surprising event to have ever happened in Manhattan, we went directly to Nintendo World in Rockefeller Center. (I hate everyone who visits midtown Manhattan in the 34 day period between Thanksgiving and New Years. Please leave now, and don't come back next year. There are trees and lights where you are from.) Neither of us had played the Wii before, and after waiting in a brief queue we got our chances, albeit on separate consoles. Wii Sports was being demo'ed downstairs; we found out later that there was Zelda upstairs, with type of line that you'd expect for Zelda. I played tennis and Scotter chose baseball. Using the Wii's remote really does put a smile on your face, and after q...

To answer a question I've been asked a few times in the past weeks, no, I'm not going to read Against the Day Are you? (Edit: Well, maybe I will, but I'm certainly going to wait until it comes out in paperback.)

My unhealthy relationship with CAPTCHAs is well-documented . (In addition to those, there is one more post that mentioned CAPTCHAs; the reason why Google's search engine performs so miserably on Google-owned Blogger posts is one of technology's great mysteries.) This article in the Guardian suggests that the spread of cheap computer and Internet to developing nations is going to lead (or already has led) to an explosion of CAPTCHA farms, in which spammers pay to have people fill them out. Much like gold farming , I'm not really sure how I feel about that. It's hard to come down completely against something that puts money directly in the hands of those who really need it–the people who would agree to work in a CAPTCHA farm are likely to be the people for whom the marginal value of a dollar a day (or less, or more) is the highest. CAPTCHA farming is analogous to call centers, offshore or otherwise, in which people who value their time less than their employers value ...

Christ, I suck at NaBloPoMo . There's something about Brooklyn pizza that Katy asked me to post and I never got around to it. Does mentioning that count as blogging?

Sheryl, my mom and I went to he Metropolitan Opera last night to see (and hear) Madama Butterfly . It was a lovely production, and forgive me if this was common knowledge, but did you know that there's a Weezer album called Pinkerton? And there's a character in Madama Butterfly named Pinkerton? And that that's intentional ? That Rivers is a cultured fellow.

Sheryl's been away in Mexico for the past week, and I've spent that time doing... pretty much nothing. I have managed to go from a two month backlog of Daily Shows/Colbert Reports on the TiVo to two week's worth, so maybe that's something to show for it. In the interest of catching up I've been skipping through the interviews on both shows unless someone noteworthy was on. I stopped to watch Richard Dawkins on the Colbert Report talking about his new book , and it's worth watching if you didn't catch it live.

I kind of want to play the game of 1000 Blank White Cards . If it catches on it would make a lot more sense than the poker craze–can you imagine watching ESPN34's The World Series of 1000 Blank White Cards and seeing someone lay the smack down with the ol' llama-eating penguin ? It would be electric! There are a few online repositories (say, this and this ) of cards, but that obviously defeats the whole purpose. Some folks are also playing it on a bulletin board .

The current Senate race in Virginia is weird . It got just a smidgen weirder today when George Allen's staffers tackled and headlocked someone named Mike Stark. Here's Stark's letter to the NBC affiliate that captured the incident on tape. Here's the Allen campaign's press release, which, as far as ridiculous press releases go, is pretty good. I wonder if this news would have gotten some airtime if this John Kerry nonsense hadn't blown up. I think what that particular story tells us is that Kerry could learn a thing or two about reading a teleprompter from his doppelganger , a noted television personality.