Cogito ergo summat

I'll attribute the lack of posting for a week not to the stress associated with the seasonal job hunt, but rather to the poor performance of my team in last week's Amazing Race. Apparently looking like Dennis Hopper doesn't get you as far as I was wont to believe. Which is bad news for my progress in the office pool and, I suppose, for Dennis Hopper. So long 100 bucks, I would have spent ye well.

But there's always a bright, if less lucrative, side. Anyone watch the debut of The Colbert Report? I've always been a huge fan of Stephen's "reporting", although I was a tad apprehensive as to how he would fill an entire half hour. But watching him face off against Stone Phillips to see who could read the most inane headlines with a straight face won me over.

My favorite: "We invited Mother Theresa to respond to these charges."

Update: watch it.

And you can always get excited with the discovery of 22 new, unearthed Elliott Smith songs (probably no coincidence that they appear two years to the week that he died.) Most of the songs are unfinished acoustic sessions, which hearkens back to Smith's Either/Or days, and reminds me of when I spent an entire summer learning out to play "Angeles."

Plus, the best movie of the year comes out on DVD today. And doing a little reading about that film's director actually helped me solve a problem. I just finished the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a great mystery novel that always seems to remind me of "Flowers for Algernon." Anyway, now bookless and looking for my next non-law read, I saw that Nolan's next project is an adaptation of a book called The Prestige, about feuding magicians in turn-of-the-century England.

I figure, I had such good luck with a book with basically the same plot, maybe that old legal nugget about stare decisis will work when it comes to novels as well.