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Good luck Jeff'y

I haven't had the chance to do this in a while: much mazel to Adam and Vanessa, who are very just recently engaged. To be married. Which, if you're keeping track, makes a perfect four-for-four in former roommates getting engaged/married. I'm just that much cooler than Dane Cook , as I don't even expect you to put out in return.

Fertile ground

There's nothing like the Times Magazine to put an end to a month-long, self-imposed (adding an air of mystery to actual laziness) blogging hiatus. First, the snark: People can’t accept failure in this country, which probably explains why kids are addicted to fantasy baseball, with its illusion of mastery. Thank you, Deborah Solomon, for the least insightful statement-cum-interview-question about fantasy baseball, ever. Ms. Solomon was fortunate that in interviewing interview Lou Pinella this week, she found a misogynistic old coot who actually leaves her looking like the more sympathetic of the interviewee-interviewer pair. Diving back into familiar territory (water can, after all, be territorial, we come to The Ethicist. This week , Randy Cohen opines that you have an ethical obligation to inform potential house buyers that the former occupant, your mother, killed herself. Because of ghosts or something. Of course, if you happen to be upset about your mother's untimely death...

How to keep up on things

Maybe you like arts and crafts and films and such, but aren't so good at keeping on top of what's new. The Times has a thorough movie review section on Fridays, but what about new music, or new books, or new Wii games? (I'm all about Cooking Mama: Cook Off .) Reading one paper's coverage isn't going to let you know about everything new. What we need is... meta-coverage. And when you need meta-coverage, there's Metacritic . I've found it seriously useful to add the individual RSS feeds for their Film , Music , and Wii sections, and depending on your tastes other sections are probably of interest as well. I don't care so much about the actual review aggregation and scoring aspect of the site, but getting release information delivered to my RSS reader is great.

Administriviata

So there's nothing like blogging about not blogging, but we obviously haven't really been blogging. I finally have something I'm proud to blame it on, though (World of Warcraft never being a source of pride for me): Sheryl got me a Wii for my birthday. It came a bit late after some eBay shipping mishaps, but it's here now and we're loving it. The extra remote and Zelda that I ordered can't get here fast enough, but in the meantime taking turns at Wii Sports is a great way to kill the evening. Look for a Wii-party in the 'hood when we get ourselves organized!

...and sometimes, well, he studies you.

Okay, you know what? I'd probably link to this article on duck phalluses on the basis of the text alone. But my goodness, look at the lead picture! And the caption!

A guide to recognizing your Robert Downey Jr. movies

The last two movies I've seen are A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (via Netflix) and Zodiac . Well, I watched about 34% of Dave Chapelle's Block Party , but I've already seen that and it was mainly an excuse to play around with my new AppleTV (which was a great purchase). But I pretty much saw those two movies back to back. You can't call either a "Robert Downey Jr. movie" unless you're grasping at (cocaine-laced?) straws for a clever blog title. Downey Jr. plays the grown-up protagonist of Saints , appearing in about a third of the movie, and a crime reporter who is in... well, what percentage of seventeen hours is fourty minutes? He's in some portion of Zodiac . I thought Saints was extremely well done. Some of the scenes that take place during the Downey Jr. character's youth in Astoria, Queens have the intensity of Spike Lee at his prime; other flash backs are more reflective and do an effective job of explaining how the Downey Jr. charact...

Additional addendum

As an addendum to the previous post , if you're not sure whether Easter Peeps are kosher for Passover, you're not religious enough that it matters.