STUDY IS MORE VALUABLE THAN SLEEP: The Orange County Register has a nice profile of the most recent TAR winners, and how they managed to successfully overcome that last Roadblock, courtesy of a detailed race journal.

Edited to remove spoiler in text per requests from commenters.

OH, THE SHARK, BABE: From Rebel Without a Cause to Eastern Promises, see if your favorite movie made the cut in this dissection of the 10 Best Knife Scenes in Movies.

Via Pop Candy.

ATTACK OF THE LITTLE GOLD MEN: Oscar nominations are out. Some interesting surprises:

• Tommy Lee Jones in for leading actor, but for Valley of Elah rather than No Country.
• No love for The Simpsons Movie or Shrek The Third in animated feature--instead, we get Surf's Up and Persepolis. Ratatouille is the clear leader in the category, though--also nominated in screenplay, sound mixing, sound editing, and original score.
• Although Into The Wild won the Golden Globe for original song, it's not even nominated, but Enchanted racks up three nods there (and even if there's no WGA waiver, the performance of "Happy Working Song" should be a hoot).
• Best Picture? Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, and No Country for Old Men.
• The mismatch between picture and director is not (as was expected) Jason Reitman being out, but Joe Wright being out and replaced by Julian Schanbel.
• A surprise non-nomination in live action short for Hotel Chevalier.
• Among your nominees--Norbit (best makeup), The Golden Compass (art direction, visual effects), and Transformers (sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects).

TRIVIAL PURSUITS: While the group of ThingThrowers (joined with a pair of random strangers) that was at the Big Quiz Thing and dubbed "Strom's Lil' Bastards" did not prevail (nor even finish in the top 10)--due largely to a nasty round of "Songs About Drugs" and a difficult multi-point question involving the identification of heavy metal bands from album names (such as the classic "Killing Is My Business, and My Business Is Good")--a good time was had by all, and "Smart-Ass Points" were awarded to our response in the audio round of giving the title and artist of a reggae song as being "Bob Marley--the one about weed" (though I liked our response of "Led Zeppelin--the one they ripped off from a black guy" better). I don't know that I've ever been to a better run bar trivia night--I hope to keep going in the future, and other ThingThrowers are welcome to join in in the future.

I'VE BEEN TO PARADISE, BUT I'VE NEVER BEEN TO MESA VERDE: Smithsonian Magazine has a very manageable list of 28 Must See/Experience Destinations, and depressingly I have seen/experienced five (Pompeii, Aurora Borealis, the Lourve, the Uffizi Gallery, and Venice).

So how many have you been to? And what one destination would you add to the list? My nominees included star-gazing on Mauna Kea, sunrise at Lake Louise, and Guernica, but I think my one addition would have to be the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Northern Minnesota.

COUNTERPROGRAMMING: Since I've already remarked on, and heard remark of, my curmudgeonly nature this morning, and since the sight of Favre doing what I will remember most about his last four or five years (that is, flinging wild interceptions) was not quite enough to clear out the stink of the Patriots yet again winning a losable game to a mediocre (without LDT, anyway) team, then just to prove that I am capable of enjoyment, I'll mention two things that did make me smile:

1. The Wire. I know that a lot of people think that the McNulty serial-killer storyline is this show's Landry-and-Tyra-Kill-a-Rapist, but I don't really care. This was a damn funny episode, with Bunk's petulance, Barlow's impermeable density, Freamon's gameness, Marlo's monolingualism, Omar's Honey-Nut Cheerios-free domesticity, Michael and Dookie's game (the game with the girls, not with the drugs, that is), Bug's Batman mask, and McNulty's fresh-air shenanigans. And for an episode to be that funny while still giving us and the characters so much heartbreak -- the minor character who bowed out this episode always was one of my favorites, though I feel like I say that every time a minor character gets written out -- requires a genius of which strike-replacement television is not capable.

2. This YouTube soccer clip. I never thought that the voice of absolute undiluted joy would come ragged from vodka and cigarettes and extolling the virtue of Leeds, but surprise, it does. As a bonus, I have it on good authority that many of the words spoken are in English, though for the life of me I can't identify which.

LITTLE BLACK BOYS AND BLACK GIRLS WILL BE ABLE TO JOIN HANDS WITH LITTLE WHITE BOYS AND WHITE GIRLS AS SISTERS AND BROTHERS: A few years ago, and by that I mean exactly a few years ago, I mentioned that when my parents' marriage was consecrated, it was also illegal in a great number of states. Today I'll note that, while their marriage was not illegal in the state in which they lived, it nonetheless was painfully scandalous, even to my family. I grew up biracial when there seemed to be very few of us, and even when I shared a geographic, economic, social, and educational background with mostly white people, most of the time my chief identifying characteristic was the part of my race that wasn't white. I had a lot of friends and family who, when we were growing up, probably couldn't have imagined themselves dating someone who isn't white.

My family today is not scandalized by interracial marriage -- all of my cousins' children are biracial. I live in a city, or at least a part of a city, where it seems that half of the families are multiracial, and I'm sending my kids to a religious school where almost all of the families are interfaith. If you read this site at all, you know that I am not prone to excessive sentimentality. My most common emotion is mild irritation, followed by annoyance, pique, exasperation, dumbfoundedness, strong irritation, schadenfreude, despair at the human condition, concealed affection, and all-consuming rage. Nonetheless, I always think that today is a good day to remember that in a lot of ways we live in a better world than the one in which our parents lived, and that we ought to be grateful to the people who sacrificed a lot to get us here.