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Sheryl raised an intriguing question tonight when she asked whether we liked Larissa Kelly more than Obama. The answer, we decided, was yes. She's back on the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions after ten long months, and the Posnick household was in a tizzy. Alex laid off on the lechery tonight but, and pardon the spoiler alert, it looks like he'll be getting another chance in the finals. Oh, and she got the question about Google right. It's like she knows me!

Looking back on my blog's archives, I'm surprised and impressed to see that I've managed to post at least once per month, every month, since March of 2003. I have a few posts saved in draft that I have trouble motivating myself to finish, but I do want to get something up for February 2009. I don't want to resort to writing a script to automatically convert each of my tweets into a blog entry. That would be cheating. Of course what I'm going to do instead, which is respond to a personal email with a blog entry, is probably cheating too. Our friends Haley and Gabe came over sometime last month for dinner, and I made a chestnut soup and shepherd's pie. The soup was mostly just this recipe from the Minimalist and was a good way to use a packet of vacuum-sealed chestnuts from Trader Joe's leftover from Thanksgiving. The shepherd's pie was something special, and something that I need to make again. It's a little too fussy for an everyday dinner, ...

Here's list of all movies released in 2008, objectively ranked from best to worst. If your movie didn't make the list, either I didn't see it or something went terribly wrong. Milk (Spoiler alert: Use by March 4th. lolz!) Rachel Getting Married (Spoiler alert: The bride is having an affair with Don Draper! wtf‽) WALL-E (Spoiler alert: The portrayal of 22nd Century Earth's decay is probably overly optimistic. lolz!) Synecdoche, New York (Spoiler alert: Everyone dies eventually. lolz!) Religulous (Spoiler alert: Most religious claims are without a sound basis in reality. wtf‽) Tell No One (Spolier alert:                                                                                lolz!) Vic...

So what exactly would it take to redeem the Times magazine from all those dreadful "Ethicist" and "Questions For..." columns (and get me blogging again in the process)? The list of things is quite short, but you'd better believe an essay about David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis on fatalism is near the top. For what it's worth, trying to make a convincing argument for fatalism via semantics seems like a poor idea to begin with, so I'm not surprised that Foster Wallace was able to demonstrate how such an argument is flawed. And Foster Wallace doesn't weigh in on whether fatalism holds true in general, just on that specific argument for it.

You'd think that if I only blogged when Randall Munroe referenced 34 (the number) in xkcd then that would not entail a lot of blogging. And it doesn't. What's surprising is that it entails any blogging at all, and yet it does . (Hint: leave your mouse over the comic to get the tooltip-goodness.)

Confirming what you already knew: 34 is super sexy .

I'm not going to get into any post-debate analysis, other than to say that the folks we were watching the debate with (not surprisingly) thought Obama "won," but I thought there were two relevant revelations offered by the candidates that warrant some further consideration. First, and least importantly, is Venezuela really a rogue state? Obama made that assertion, lumping it together with Iran. Hugo Chavez likes to run his mouth off against America and in all likelihood has offered material support to FARC rebels/terrorists in Colombia, but last I checked we're still buying oil from them at a record pace. Is that going to change with an Obama presidency? Second, and most importantly, McCain flat out stated (twice!) that the United States has tortured prisoners under the Bush administration. Not "used enhanced interrogation techniques" against prisoners, but tortured them. Condeelzza Rice has just gone on the record by saying that she and other top-level...