Shocked and happy. There are more there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and Wendy's. Paging Morgan Spurlock.

So cute it hurts.

I've never wanted anything to be over as much as I wanted to be done with this series and I think the network executives agreed with me because the final episode is rushed and jumbled as if the writers were told at the beginning of the episode: "We told you you had 2 episodes left, but you only have one, sorry." Veronica was an inconsistent and judgmental mean-spirited Encyclopedia Brown, which sounds interesting, but generally struck me as shallow. And yet, still better than 85% of television out there.

Wow! The dialogue was my favorite part, and not for all the salty cussiness. It's as well written, and has its own distinct rhythm/music/sound, as West Wing, if not, (gasp) better.

Really, when one is stuffing sausage, it's pretty hard to resist making junior high jokes. So why resist?

This was basically Alton Brown's recipe, except that I forgot the parsley and added paprika and red pepper flake. It was delicious, and surprisingly easy to make, fill, and cook.



I cooked them by poaching them in a splash of water, covered, then removed the lid so the water could cook off, and then seared them. I ended up overstuffing the sausages, so the casings burst during cooking in a few cases, but that was OK, as they held their shape anyway.

It took me forever to read this post on the Freakonomics blog. Bill James, baseball guru, answers all of your questions. He's got an interesting way of shooting down some stupid questions.
Also, in reference to Malcolm Gladwell's fascinating article from a recent New Yorker, in which he discusses the multiplicity of brilliant ideas like calculus, here is a zombie survival guide. A couple guys and I TOTALLY set up a zombie preparedness plan on the wiki at work a year and a half ago.

Finally, something to bring down Obama. Oliver Willis has it all figured out. Scandalous. (Via Balloon Juice)

Ryan Gosling was good as a just-off, maladjusted little brother. Lars and the Real Girl was unremarkable in most ways, but not in a negative way. Sometimes unremarkable can be pleasant, too.

xkcd says it all about a lot of things, now it's saying it all about bacon.

This list of 75 things every guy, well, really everyone, needs to know is interesting mostly because I think there's an entire genre of books of lists like these fleshed out. In any case, my favorites?

52. Step into a job no one wants to do. When I was 13, my dad called me into his office at the large urban mall he ran. He was on the phone. What followed was a fairly banal 15-minute conversation, which involved the collection of rent from a store. On and on, droning about store hours and lighting problems. I kept raising my eyebrows, pretending to stand up, and my dad kept waving me down. I could hear only his end, garrulous and unrelenting. He rolled his eyes as the excuses kept coming. His assertions were simple and to the point, like a drumbeat. He wanted the rent. He wanted the store to stay open when the mall was open. Then suddenly, having given the job the time it deserved, he put it to an end. "So if I see your gate down next Sunday afternoon, I'm going to get a drill and stick a goddamn bolt in it and lock you down for the next week, right?" When he hung up, rent collected, he took a deep breath. "I've been dreading that call," he said. "Once a week you gotta try something you never would do if you had the choice. Otherwise, why are you here?" So he gave me that. And this...

53. Sometimes, kick some ass.