When I got to the office today there was a package sitting on my desk. I received my sixth copy of Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” — I keep giving them away! — via Amazon’s used book marketplace. The book is in near-perfect condition, perhaps because it seems to have been stolen from the Naperville, Illinois Public Library. Either someone stole the book from the library and then sold it on Amazon, a Naperville Public Library employee is stealing books and selling them on Amazon, or the administrators of the Naperville Public Library are knowingly reselling their library books on Amazon. I don’t think that stealing library books is a crime that any police department seriously enforces, so people could presumably make quite a bit of money stealing library books and posting them for sale on Amazon. How odd.

Last night I finished reading Bleachers, by John Grisham. (I read it in three or four 50-page bursts; it’s not very long.) It’s a story about the legacy of a dying high school football coach. The main character is the star quarterback who returns home fifteen years after graduation to pay his respects and come to terms with his relationship with his former mentor. I’d give it three out of five stars. I’m not particularly fond of Grisham’s writing style, but this was a very good story. My mom gave me the book for Christmas last year, in ‘05, and I just happened to grab it on my way out the door a few days ago. If you see it sitting on a shelf, it’s worth a few hours of your time.

I was in football nirvana this weekend. I watched no less than a dozen games — college and pro — since I left the office Friday night. The best by far was last night’s Boise State / Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl, one of the top ten football games I’ve ever seen. While watching Saturday night’s Giants / Redskins contest on the NFLN I kept wondering about all the commercials they kept airing for themselves. “Why in the world,” I asked, “do they keep showing me commercials for something they know I already have?”

The only people who could have possibly seen all the ads for the NFLN were the people that currently have the NFLN. And it wasn’t just the 30-second commercials spots, either. During the game they were constantly bombarding me with teasers and float-overs talking about how wonderful they are. Aside from the fact that it was mildly annoying, it was also pointless!

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This is an essay I wrote a loooong time ago … I must have been 13 or 14 … good old St. Paul’s Catholic Elementary School in Daytona Beach, FL …

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If you’ve never seen Midnight Run, I’m here to tell you it’s a pretty damn good movie. Charles Grodin always cracks me up. I am way behind on my media consumption this month. There’s the five most recent episodes of Rescue Me and the last two episodes of Entourage waiting on my TiVo.

I’ve been on a bit of a reading binge lately, though. In the last month or so I’ve knocked off How to Lose a Battle: Foolish Plans and Great Military Blunders, Dr. Twitchell’s excellent Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, and The Best American Sports Writing 2003. I also have four books that I’m dying to read in the on-deck circle right now, too: The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean, Positively Fifth Street, Next Man Up : A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL, by John Feinstein, and Dr. Twitchell’s Where Men Hide.

Last night I finished Living It Up : America’s Love Affair with Luxury, by James Twitchell. This is, if I remember correctly, the fifth book of his that I’ve read, and it did not disappoint.

This book (and AdCult) should be required reading in high school. Dr. Twitchell travels to Rodeo Drive, 5th Avenue, Miami, and Vegas — bravely bringing his wife and daughter on investigative “shopping” trips, too — to decipher what exactly is it that draws us to consume, consume, consume … It’s fascinating and scary, revolutionary and eye-opening. Before you buy another $180 pair of jeans or $5000 purse, pick up a $10 copy of this book and learn why you want those things in the first place.

Wow. I (finally) just finished reading Krakatoa — The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester. Crazy stuff. I liked it. It’s a smidge on the textbook-side, but he’s an entertaining enough writer — and the topic is so incredible — that you don’t ever get bored during its 380-ish pages. The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was pretty much the first “world-wide” event. It was the first real “news item” that happened after the advent of global communications (the telegraph).

Winchester examines the legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island Krakatoa, which was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogotá and Washington, D.C. went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island’s destruction were heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all — in view of today’s new political climate — the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims, one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.

This is one case where you can’t really trust the reviews at Amazon. Take it from me: Game Theory at Work: How to Use Game Theory to Outthink and Outmaneuver Your Competition is an excellent book. It’s been on my reading list for over a year now, and just last night I finally finished. Miller does a fine job of relating game theory to the workplace and to relationships, and his examples are entertaining to read even if you are not as fascinated by the topic as I am.

Today I finally finished Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, which has been sitting on my reading list for well over a year now. It’s not so much a “book” as it is a huge collection of quotes and stories from cast members, producers, writers, directors, etc. It could have been subtitled “All About Lorne Michaels” to be honest with you; it seemed like every other quote was somebody talking about him. It was quite fun to read, though. I’m a big fan of the show and have been for as long as I can remember.

I have never been able to forget one sketch. It was the one where Kevin Nealon was a reporter covering the “All Drug Olympics” and the weight-lifter’s arms ripped out of his sockets. I don’t think I had ever laughed so hard in my life. I picked up the phone and called one of my friends to ask him if he’d just seen it, and he had. Everyone was talking about that skit at school on Monday, too. For some reason that memory is lodged in my mind and I don’t think I’ll ever lose it.

Just a bunch of random thoughts I’ve been meaning to post …

• It took me for-freaking-ever to recognize that it’s Matt Dillon doing the voiceover on the Pontiac Torrent commercials. It took me five minutes to find and download Struggle, by Ringside — the music from the commercial. I snagged a couple of their other songs, too. Pretty good stuff. I thought (incorrectly) that it was something by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, a band I found on the Mr. & Mrs. Smith soundtrack. (Note: If you’re looking to grab the song on the soundtrack via iTunes, they trick you! The song is listed as Mondo Boongo and you have to buy the entire soundtrack if you want to get it. But! If you look, you can find the song on iTunes under it’s actual title, Mondo Bongo. Sneaky iTunes people.)
• I got a black Motorola RAZR (with Cingular) a few weeks before Christmas. With the sole exception of Motorola’s moronic address book — which has been retarded ever since they started making cell phones; why the hell does the same person show up multiple times if I add more than one phone number for the entry?! — this is hands-down the best cell phone I’ve ever had. I’ve had Verizon and Sprint since I moved to LA, and I think that Cingular has the best service here. The reception is even better than it was with my previous Cingular phone (a Nokia) and you just cannot beat the form factor. Slick.
• Quite Frankly, with Stephen A. Smith, on ESPN, is a darn good show. I don’t always agree with him, but I like his delivery. TiVo it. Update: I’ve changed my mind. He bugs.
• If you’re a web developer and you want to add slick graphs and charts to a site, you really can’t do much better than Fusion, from InfoSoftGlobal. It’s good stuff. Easy to build, Flash-animated, XML-driven, works with ASP or PHP. Check ‘em out.
• I’m going to do my damn level best to run the twenty-first L.A. Marathon this year. I’ve been chugging along with a friend since early December and am knocking out 5, 8, and 10-mi runs pretty regularly now.
• Rumor Has It is an excellent movie. Is it Oscar-worthy? No. But it’s very fun and very original and well worth your $10.
• Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Amazon) is one of the top twenty best books I’ve ever read. A good friend of mine sent it to me as a Christmas present from my Amazon wishlist. I tore through it in two nights and was floored. It’s making its way through my office now. I highly recommend it. (And thanks, Bob!)

Just finished reading Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism, by P.J. O’Rourke. It was pretty good, a quick read. If you like P.J., it’s more of the same.

I also (finally) knocked off David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which was absolutely hysterical. Seriously funny stuff. Next up: How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter. I’m also almost done with Alistair Horne’s fabulous Seven Ages of Paris, (which I actually picked up at The Louvre). Oh, and my dad just sent me Magical Thinking: True Stories by Augusten Burroughs. I’m only about 100 pages into it, but it’s great so far.

There’s an excellent excerpt from ESPN College Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of the Game on the ESPN site right now. It’s the story of how the BCS was born and the history of the college football polling system. Go read it!

This weekend I finally finished Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It was a terrific read, truly wonderful. Bryson managed to make even the most esoteric, incredibly — for lack of a better word — boring details about life on this planet inconceivably fascinating. I mean really, it takes a brilliant author to get you completely engrossed in plate tectonics, genome theories, and the Brownian motion of subatomic particles. I’m not a very good test subject, actually, because I tend to find these types of things amazing and fun even when presented in incredibly bland tomes on them, but I have to tell you that even if you aren’t even barely interested in glaciers or the lipids that comprise your cell walls, this book will enthrall you.

I also just recently finished “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach. This book, too, was just so damn fun to read. A bit morbid, to be sure, but Roach approaches everything with a bent towards comedy and I enjoyed it.

And lastly I should mention that my girlfriend and I managed to catch March of the Penguins on Friday night. If it doesn’t win an Academy Award — or two or three or four — I will be astonished.

Tonight was the premiere of the final season of one of my favorite shows — Six Feet Under, on HBO. It’s really brilliant, this show. I can’t get over how every episode is just so freaking fantastic. I’m going to be a bit sad when it’s gone.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I used to never watch television. For the first twenty-five years of my life, if you had asked me, I would have said that I didn’t consider myself a tv-watcher, even that I didn’t really like tv (except for football, of course). In the last five or six years, though, I’ve become addicted to quite a few shows: Law & Order, West Wing, CSI: Miami, the Sopranos … I honestly think that some of the best production/writing/acting in media is on these shows, but I am also wondering if it’s really TV that’s getting better or if it’s just that I am getting older.

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What a great book! I just finished reading “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions“, and I feel like I need to take a nap. It’s a thrilling, true account of a group of college kids that managed — in two years! — to fleece the big casino corporations out of over $3million by using stastics and good memories to kick ass at blackjack. It will keep you on the edge of your seat, and have you rooting for the Robin-Hood-esque kids the whole time. I highly recommend it.