As my dad likes to say: "We've upped our standards. Up yours."

I know I've said it a million times before, but I heart This American Life. I can only think of about four reasons I wish I was American, and one of them is so I could listen to public radio. So today, feeling Christmassy, I donated some money to them to help pay for the $150,000 bill they had for bandwidth last year--a result of the fact that you can listen to every episode online for free or subscribe to the free podcast on iTunes. I really like giving away money. It makes me feel like I am subverting capitalism. Like, yeah, I'll work for money, but then I'll just GIVE IT AWAY. Ha! Put that in your free-market pipe and smoke it!

I'm having some friends over for dinner tonight, and I'm cooking beer-basted boar ribs. For real. In my slow-cooker. I got up super-early and put all the "mats" into the slow-cooker, and hopefully when I get home dinner will be there, like a Christmas miracle. I found the recipe online, but I added a bottle of beer so I could say they were "beer-basted." An endless series of jokes about my cooking skill (330, baby!) and the "well fed" bonus will ensue. I'm looking forward to it. Studies suggest gamers like hanging out with other gamers--it makes them feel less awkward.

I've just discovered summize, a website that acts as a kind of meta-reviewer, consolidating reviews from across the blogipelago. So, for example, I type in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" (the new Barbara Kingsolver book about food that I bought in hardcover and I am saving to read over Christmas holidays) and it produces this handy little graphic:


That little colour graph suggests that this book is going to be as exciting and fabulous as I think it is! The only problem with this mode of evaluating potential entertainment products is that, based on my experience with all consuming, other people are not nearly critical enough for my tastes. The internet needs to raise the bar.

PS. I have a surprisingly large number of posts tagged capitalism.