Yes, it's been a while since I've posted. Part of me has been busy, part of me has been lazy. I guess I'm counting down the days before my Jeopardy! appearance, and getting some viewing parties set up. Plus, there's the annual trivia contest/barbecue (which is now the best way to describe Trashmasters) next weekend, so that'll be good -- also a good time to tell even more people I'll be on TV.

Thanksgiving was nice with Victoria, Phil and the Norasaurus coming back into town, and I even got suckered into some Black Friday shopping and survived -- but then again, when you know what you want (a bunch of dirt-cheap DVDs), it just seemed like another day. And now I guess I can accept the Christmas season being here (it was strange seeing all the trees up at work by last weekend), although it was odd hearing Alvin and the Chipmunks being used to sell Sopranos DVDs.

Other random thoughts:
-- RIP, Mr. Miyagi. Although I guess I would've expected him to be older, but I suppose he never really aged a whole lot in the 20-plus years since the movie came out.
-- The local pop station is doing a "lost hits" weekend, so it amusing to hear this song or even this song, but this song should've been lost for sure (you realize Adam Sandler wrote similar lyrics to be funny).
-- My schedule for New Year's is up in the air, but if things fall the right way, a trip to Nashville for a bowl game would be just fine for me. Just too bad Vandy had to lose to both MTSU and Kentucky, or else that could've been NU's opponent.
-- Yes, I've watched the final tables of the WSOP a few times. It really is like the I Love The '80s in stuff that oddly holds up in repeated viewings. But I can't help but think that when I see Andrew Black on TV that it's really a slimmed down Paul Giamatti with Alan Rickman's voice.
-- And speaking of Snape, the latest Harry Potter movie was pretty good, and even the Dawson's Creek-type storylines came across pretty well.
-- It's weird that in baseball, pitching wins are an official stat, yet there are eight jillion ways to crunch the numbers to prove it's an overrated stat (see Roger Clemens' stats this season). Yet football has a rather complex formula to determine quarterback efficiency/rating/etc. but wins get brought up all the time as the number that matters over any other stat. (e.g. Joe Montana and Tom Brady vs. Dan Marino and Peyton Manning).
-- Late in posting this article from Romenesko, but it's curious to see schools where the white kids are the dumb ones. You might even want to cue up the part in The Cable Guy where Ben Stiller says the people who killed his brother were speaking Asian.
-- If you read this story about trying to rename a road after Rosa Parks, you'd think "diverse" would mean the same thing as "urban," especially when the spokesman refers to Clayton County as "a predominantly diverse community."