• For research purposes: a Fast Company article about a guy in Kansas who converts Hummers to biodiesel and doubles both their fuel efficiency and their horsepower, using only standard GM parts. Yeah, I know, big whoop — my Corolla gets better mileage, and biofuels don’t scale for mass consumption, but it’s still pretty interesting.
• Christopher Moore delivers An Old Child’s Letter to Santa. Amen.

This blog is not about my Halloween costume this year, which I am still in the process of assembling. You’ll see photos of it (and Kristie’s) soon enough.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about a conversation from a couple of weeks ago over at Vern’s place. BJ mentioned he’d thought about dressing as David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, but it was too expensive. Too pricey for me, too, between the brown pinstriped suit and pants, Converse sneakers, and brown trenchcoat.

It’s still tempting, though, for two reasons. One, it’s so hard to find a good costume that already matches my glasses, more or less; and two, once I buy the trenchcoat, I’d be halfway to another good nerd costume for next year.

If I wanted an easier Doctor Who costume, I could always dress as the Ninth Doctor, except everyone would wonder why I didn’t bother dressing up. That’s sort of my outfit anyway during the cooler months. I’d have to shave my head for it to work, and I’m not quite that dedicated.

That was a predictable World Series, wasn’t it? I know I predicted it… kinda. Not on my blog, of course, which would have made me look much smarter than this late blog entry does now, but I swear I did.

Before game 1, much was made of the Rockies taking two of three game in Boston back in June. That jogged my memory and made me look at the Rockies’ June schedule. A week later, they swept the Yankees. Then they immediately lost 9 of 10 to the Blue Jays, Cubs, and Astros, a stretch in which Brian Fuentes blew four straight saves and lost the closer’s job. Then they won 5 of 6 from the Mets and Phillies.

Good streak, bad streak, good streak. I don’t know what causes these Rockies streaks, but they lived and died by them this year. So my pre-Series prediction was either a Rockies sweep or a Red Sox sweep, depending on the streak. Maaaybe a five-game series if the other team could steal a win, but either way it would end at Coors Field.

As King Kaufman pointed out today, of the last four World Series, we’ve had three sweeps and one five-game series. Which makes for some seriously boring games unless you’re a fan of the winning team. But hey, in the last four Series, the Cardinals have been in it twice and the Rockies once, so I can’t complain too loudly.

Of course, the other reason a Boston win was predictable: Boston’s team salary is almost three times Colorado’s, including big free agent starting pitchers. The amount paid just for the rights to negotiate with Matsuzaka ($51 million) almost tops the Rockies’ team total ($55 million). Yes, it is possible to buy yourself a championship, although it depends on who you spend it on.

I have an especially long and random set of links today.

• A collection of rare sketches and pre-Calvin & Hobbes work from Bill Watterson. This looks an awful lot like Calvin’s dad in college.
• Speaking of the funny pages, Shaenon and Andrew have a theory about Funky Winkerbean.
• Fellow V-Hiver Jeremy Love earned the first spot on DC’s new Zuda webcomic label with his depression-era fantasy Bayou. Jill Allyn is doing the title sequences. Newsarama also interviewed Jeremy.
• Are your vocabulary skills good enough to feed the hungry? That’s not a non-sequitur, that’s FreeRice. I got to 400 grains and level 43 before giving up.
• The cost of war will top $2.4 trillion by 2017, which probably doesn’t even count the cost of healthcare for returning veterans. For the record, we’ve already spent over $600 billion, and the total debt has risen about $3.5 trillion (to a total of $9 trillion) since Bush took office.
• The government’s terrorist watch list now has over 750,000 names. Gosh, with such laser-like focus, I feel safer already. Does anybody still believe the government has been eavesdropping solely on terrorists?
• Back to funner stuff: I couldn’t get into The IT Crowd, a Brit sitcom about two IT geeks in a large company and their female, non-techie boss, despite its subject matter and its fabulous opening credit sequence. (8-bit character sprites!) Despite that, I found this very interesting — now that the US version has been scrapped, the original show’s creator ponders what he would change if he could do it over.
• And finally, here’s something exclusively for Vern. Oddly enough, it’s regarding another Brit show remade in the US — Blackpool, a strange musical-drama in which the actors sing (and dance) along with the original versions of popular songs. It was remade this fall as Viva Laughlin on CBS and mercifully canceled after two episodes. But this clip of The Doctor himself, David Tennant, as a detective investigating a thuggish casino owner, makes me smile.

My first thought at following this link was, “Eeeee! Paul Krugman has a blog!”

Krugman, of course, is a professor of economics and liberal columnist for the NY Times specializing in wonkish broadsides against the GOP.

(Is my nerdiness mitigated at all by the fact that as I write this, I’m flipping the TV back and forth between the Broncos game and Game 7 of the ALCS? Ehh… probably not.)

Over the life of this blog, I’ve posted quite a few links to segments of The Daily Show, so this brand new site could be extremely useful: thedailyshow.com, which hosts not only last night’s episode but a video archive of every show dating back to 1999.

Since the site is working through some launch-day server problems, I can’t tell whether you can link to a specific segment or only to the entire show, nor have I been able to search the videos. However, in theory, a trip through the archives might be fascinating. I started watching in 2002, around the time when seemingly everyone in America suffered the same mass-hallucination that Bush was a great leader and Iraq was a threat. The only person on TV who seemed immune — and kept me sane — was Jon Stewart.

Also announced today was Stewart’s contract extension that will keep him hosting The Daily Show through 2010. I’ll be watching.

• Assuming “printed on quality canvas” means it’s printed on cloth like the original prop, then I would totally hang this replica of the map from Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits on my wall.
• If you’re considering a vote for Rudy Guiliani because he seems reasonable, you might want to watch this video from Josh Marshall.
• Scientists have discovered an Earth-like planet that may support life.
• John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, Maria Bamford, and BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin contributed to an audio adaptation of George Saunders’ “Ask the Optimist” for Sound of Young America. Definitely worth a listen:

  
The Sound of Young America: Ask the Optimist


And all they had to do was go on a 21-1 winning streak.

In other news, tomorrow night’s pork chops sprouted wings and flew right out of my homemade soy-ginger marinade, and Satan was spotted buying ice skates at Dick’s Sporting Goods.

• Publisher’s Weekly interviews Jim Massey. “Little more than a rabid fan-boy?” Really?
• This seems like a good idea: Catalog Choice purports to function as a sort of do-not-call list for sales catalogs. “The production and disposal of direct mail alone consumes more energy than 3 million cars.” Of course, most of the direct mail I get is from Democratic campaigns asking for more money, even though I only give online. I wish there was a way to halt that, too.
• As you can see, we spent our Saturday night at a They Might Be Giants show. It also happened to be the centerpiece of this fall’s Club Crawl, which combined with the downtown construction made parking a nightmare. If you want to hear the show, it is supposed to be posted to this page, although it’s not there yet.