• No Heroics is low-budget a British sitcom about fucked-up, schleppy C-list superheros. It's a mutant hybrid of Coupling, Mystery Men, and Cheers; episodes consist mostly of The Heatness, Timebomb, Girl Power, and Electroclash kvetching over beers at the superheros-only pub. It's crass, tasteless, and the timing is solid so far; definitely worth a torrent if you're here in the US.
  
• Nosh, an awesome local gem in downtown Geneva. It's a breakfast/brunch place with a serious bent toward foodie-style quirkiness. Catherine and I made it out for a nice brunch this morning, and I died for the Red Eye Benedict: two poached eggs on english muffins with coffee-encrusted flatiron steak, covered in shiitake hollandaise. Gorgeous fresh sliced pears on the side. I'm drooling just remembering it.
• The New York Times has awesome content, but it's always been plagued by by nasty javascript that popped up word definitions whenever I double-clicked on text in its articles. Today, they rolled out a new version of the script that makes tooltip-style icons over words rather than firing up windows automatically. It's stupid and silly, but man. My Times reading experience is so much nicer. Woo!

  

• FiveThirtyEight feeds my need for election nerdpr0n. It's a polling stats wonk site, and crunches serious numbers from all the national and local polls being conducted over the course of the 2008 race.
• Warcraft III. Nate is to blame for this one, but slowly I'm getting better at skirmishes. My old go-to tactic from Age of Empire II -- slowly build up an overwhelming force in secret, then clobber the opposition -- was getting me mulched on a regular basis.
  
• Franziskaner, possibly the yummiest 'everyday' beer in the universe. It's light and very smooth, with a fruity taste that doesn't bite. It's super-delicious.

Further updates as awesomeness warrants.

Observations about New York:

• Pedestrians are aggressive, and cars stop for them. Street traffic and foot traffic seem to exist in a homogenized mix here, with traffic lights only indicating where the heaviest flow is currently going. It's fascinating.
• Chicago may have the best deep dish in the world, but I think we should be willing to conceded the Thin Crust Crown. Holy cow is the pizza here good.
• A nontrivial percentage of the population actually does dress like they're auditioning for Sex And The City. I tripped over more twiggy, heavy-lidded makeup models with gigantic furry hats on one subway ride than I thought actually existed in the wild. Is LA like this? I hear about this fierce LA/New York rivalry, but I'm a simple Midwestern boy. We're too busy herding our cows and chewing straw to pay too much attention.
• Soho is cool, and I like the shops there. If the traffic weren't o heavy and the weather weren't so bitterly cold, it'd be fun to just spend a day or two poking around and browsing and eating at vegetarian pasta cafes, etc.
• I managed to swing by Purl, an awesome little textiles/crafts/knitting suply shop, and pick up some fun stuff for Catherine. (Shhhhh. Don't tell her, it's a surprise.) The store is awesome, but also dazzlingly packed with yawns and fabric and needles and so on. Like, thousands of patterns. Jillions even. I felt dizzy.
• The Apple Store is three blocks from my hotel room. It is a shrine to geekiness. Naturally, I used a digital camera to record a movie of it.

So. All in all, New York is cool. If I ever come back I think I'll have to bring the Canon; I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't get some high quality shots of the assorted bits of city life. But I'm ready to scamper back home now, and watch movies and play cribbage and be with Catherine. My everyday life is good, and I'm eager to get back to it.