I have a host of deadlines and speeches and events over the next five weeks (including this one), plus have already laid out money to attend a poker tournament in Las Vegas later this month that compresses my schedule further; blogging on this site will be light to non-existent for a few weeks.

And I don't care what the NFL says, my party Sunday is a Super Bowl party.

Genpets.

	January 2007	2007 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	4.3%	4.3%	14.4%	16.5%
S&P 500	1.5%	1.5%	14.5%	13.6%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	0.4%	5.3%

Buy: AES @ $21.59; ATU @ $47.26

Sell: half of KMX @ $55.15

A good chunk of this month's profit came from KMX; I should offer a newsletter service that lets people know when I sell stock, so that they can get in on it. (BBI is up a painful 70% since I sold it.) KMX went up another 5% after I rebalanced my portfolio. AES got immediately hit by Venezuelan confiscations, which I mistakenly thought were already priced into the stock. PIR had a good month, as did FLWS; CBH, not so much.

In Slate, Kim Masters makes a point similar to the one I made when Slim and I saw LKoS. (Many spoilers.)

I'm looking forward to "The Ten." Radosh calls it "a smart comedy about dumb comedy" that will "bomb[] in the theaters because the jokes will be way too obscure for the masses (both in terms of references and sensibility)." My kind of blurb. [Radosh; IMDB]

It's interesting how so many movies I like are just absolutely buried by their movie studio: "Idiocracy" and "Children of Men" just in the last year. (Throw in "Brazil" for a full-fledged studio-buried-dystopia film festival.) Slim and I also liked the black comedy "Pretty Persuasion," which critics just loathed, and disappeared from the theaters with next to no publicity. Netflix saves many of these movies.

A shanda fer die goyim.

Wikipedia Brown (via Volokh).

Retconning "Star Wars" (via Cowen).

I only eat out once a week, if that, these days, so I haven't been out as much, but I do have a couple of ratifications of Tyler Cowen endorsements:

Kotobuki (MacArthur Blvd.) is $1/piece sushi. They don't take reservations, and they don't have a wide selection, and I don't buy into Tyler's assertion that this is the best sushi in town, but I will say that it's good enough to be the best sushi value in the city, and perhaps the Eastern seaboard. I'd certainly rather go here than Kaz Sushi Bistro; I still prefer the much more expensive Sushi Taro, but Slim keeps getting sick every time we go there.

When I was in college, friends would take me for sushi. I was okay with it, but I didn't understand the enthusiasm for sushi—until I got to Los Angeles and discovered the difference between really good sushi and the run-of-the-mill stuff.

I had another revelation yesterday. A good college friend had an Indian girlfriend, and took me out when a Waltham restaurant started offering Southern Indian. Dosas, iddly, uttapam: it was okay, but I didn't get what he found exciting about it. Now I do: Saravana Palace (Fairfax) is quite phenomenal, by far the best Southern Indian and the best vegetarian restaurant I've ever been to. (Though I have not yet been to Udupi Palace in Takoma Park.) Everything from the dosas to the warm gulabjamun was impeccable. The menu is huge, and the weekend buffet offered a sampling of a couple of dozen of the items, plus seven chutneys for make-your-own dal papri and bhel puri. To top it all off, it's ridiculously cheap: only $9.95. Amazingly, this is right across from the Wegman's, it just got named to the Washingtonian Top 100 (and with three stars, no less), and yet Slim and I were the only non-Indians in there. People are missing out. We loved our meal, and didn't even have the paneer makhini or channa batura that Washingtonian raved about.

We craved Ethiopian another night, but couldn't find parking at Abiti. It was a cold night, so for some reason Adams-Morgan offered more parking, and we made our way to Meskerem, which is competent and enjoyable, but not as good as Abiti—though the service is certainly much better and quicker at Meskerem.

Between my continued visits to the personal trainer, and Slim's 11-pound weight-loss, I can now hypothetically bench-press Slim. I say hypothetically, because I haven't been allowed to empirically test the proposition.

I think Five Guys is much better than In-n-Out.

We're a year late to this party, but Slim and I are enjoying the DVD of the "How I Met Your Mother" sitcom, an increasingly successful Friendsian fantasy about five Manhattan professional twentysomethings with no discernible source of income but a 3000-sq. ft. apartment (albeit one with a single tiny bathroom) and lots of money for $10 martinis. We're sixteen episodes into it. Supporting players Neil Patrick Harris and Allyson Hannigan are excellent and funny—almost too good, because they end up being light years ahead of the other cast members. But, oy, the show is flawed, which makes me worry for its long-term success.

1) The framing device—the lead character, Ted, explaining to his bored children in 2030 his dating adventures in 2005—isn't just creepy, it's, well, really poorly thought out. Suspense is destroyed. We know from the first episode that Ted won't end up with "Aunt Robin"; thus it's hard to care about the Ross-and-Racheling the two are going through (about three Friends seasons worth in the first sixteen episodes). We haven't met "the mother" yet, but when we do, all the suspense and will-they or won't-they of the relationship will be similarly destroyed: there certainly can't be any tension over whether they will have children.

You can tell the network suits were bothered by the whole telling-the-story-to-children thing, too.

In the first few episodes, the kids realistically sit on the couch bored in the beginning, middle, and end of the episode, as they sit through another lecture from dad about the lessons of his dating life. Which isn't all that funny, disrupts the pacing from the main plotlines, and, plus, sends the message "This is boring."

You can see the note sent: make the kids more enthusiastic. A few episodes in, they're grinning like banshees, and the kids aren't good enough actors to pull it off.

In the latest batch of episodes we've seen, the kids are absent entirely, though the framing device remains as a voiceover. I have to think they'll abandon it at the beginning of one season or another without any explanation. (And an IMDB check inadvertently shows that Bob Saget, who plays the older Ted, isn't in every episode, which makes me think I'm right. I guess I'll see.)

2) I won't complain too much about silly plotlines that require characters or outsiders to behave unrealistically: "I ruined an $8000 dress that I wasn't supposed to wear!" is just part of the sitcom genre.

3) Slim complains about the wardrobe in the show. I tend not to notice these things so much, though one episode featured the character of Robin in a formal dress that was a size too small on her while everyone gushed about what a perfect dress it was for her, and since then, her wardrobe has been distractingly ill-fitting.

4) Neil Patrick Harris's character, Barney: in some episodes Barney is a brilliant Yuppie mash-up of the Fonz and Sgt. Bilko. Other episodes, Barney is a WASPy and skinny George Costanza. Both are hilariously funny cartoons, and the best part of the show, but they're not the same character.

5) The Ted character himself is grating at times, but the show is getting around this in the most recent episodes we've watched by having the other characters more aggressively point this out.

Of course, with the occasional exception of an Arrested Development that is running from the gate, sitcoms often take some time to find themselves: early Seinfeld episodes are a different animal from the show at its peak; Family Ties was planned as a starring vehicle for Meredith Baxter-Birney; The Simpsons didn't figure out right away that Homer was its star, and early episodes were considerably slower-paced and more conventional than it was at its peak; and The Office (American version) didn't figure out right away that it was more than a carbon copy of its British counterpart. And who remembers Ross's monkey and son? Certainly not Ross in the last few seasons of Friends.

All of this commentary is without reading various blog entries by Throwing Things and Sepinwall about the show (which I'll catch up on somewhere down in the future), so I hope I'm not duplicating their work independently; their obvious love for the show is what prompted us to Netflix the disk.