A new Space Monkeys! comic is up this morning. We're hoping this will slide you easily toward the weekend.

iTunes just added Friday Night Lights to the TV shows it offers.

I know. I know. I see you rolling your eyes. A show about football? In Texas?

Look, I didn't think it was gonna be any good either. Now it's probably my favorite program on TV (and it makes me teary eyed almost every week). You can download the pilot for free on iTunes. Really, just give it a chance. I promise it's fantastic.

She lived her life like a melted candle in the wind.

The same day I posted how much I liked the Super Bowl commercial with Robert Goulet, I got this e-mail:

Hi Omar,

Just a quick "thank you" for your comment which was forwarded to us regarding the Emerald Nuts commercial . Actually Mr. Goulet has been bombarded with a ton of e-mail -- all positive. It appears that your opinion is in consensus with a large percentage of the viewers. I agree -- it is funny

Mr. Goulet sends his best and so do I.

Vera Goulet
WWW.ROBERTGOULET.COM

She liked my post way better than she liked a recent one at Hitch Magazine.

A few more from this week's show:

Michael Dell has returned to Dell as CEO of the company after stepping down from the position in 2004. His first task since taking charge of the company: sending himself to India to answer Dell's phone line.

U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams set a record this week for the longest time a woman has spent in space. She was in space for 22 hours, 27 minutes. Back on earth, her husband also set a record: most times a man has masturbated in one day.

Today for lunch, I walked to Thundercloud, which really is just across the street, but the weather was so perfect (it's early spring, peeps!) that it went from being a necessary sandwich run to a blissed-out sensory journey. I particularly like what you've done with leaves and with breezes, God. Nice work on that.

Talked to my buddy Marcus, who I simply cannot have a conversation with that doesn't involve laughter every three seconds. Unspeakable things were spoken, many of them about submersibles, filming of. We caught up, shared news, made terrible jokes about brown babies.

I also caught up with my friend Victor, who was in town on a job interview. I drove him to San Antonio and he and another friend took me out for an awesome old-school chicken fried steaks and enchiladas dinner at an ancient family restaurant on the south side. For some strange reason, these two seemingly disconnected foods are entwined, harmoniously, at many Tex-Mexy restaurants. I am not the person you will hear complain of this.

Work has gone from being a bit slow to making me feel like, "Ohmygod how am I gonna find time to write all these stories I want to write!" But it's a nice problem to have and the scary, over-my-head feeling that I had at least once every week at my old job is no longer there.

New Smallville recap is up:

Loose Lips Sink 'Ships -- Clark, Chloe, Lana. Lex, Clark, Lana. Chloe, Lois, Clark. Jimmy, Chloe, Clark. Clark, Oliver, Lois. Is anybody else getting sick of all these love triangles? Not the writers of Smallville, who keep pushing and pulling the shapes around the table hoping to form some sort of awesome nonagon. But if you have to resort to making Lois wear red Kryptonite lipstick and Clark act like a jerk to everybody when he gets infected by a Lois kiss, maybe you're just trying too hard.

He doesn't have a name yet, but I think I'm going to really like our new character, introduced in a new Space Monkeys! comic this morning.

All the Super Bowl articles I've read today have annoyed me because the Federline thing was lame (and the punchline was way ruined; also, didn't we see the same commercial done better with MC Hammer?), and nobody is giving props to the clear funniest commercial, the one with Robert Goulet.

Lord, is this funny:

We went back and forth on this story I wrote about people still looking for the Nintendo Wii. It was supposed to run on A1, then it was starting to be more of a business story, then it ended up as a lead story in today's Tech Monday section (even though the end result was not primarily a business story).

I was totally fine with it because they did a very cool illustration for it, didn't cut the story for space and even ran the full sidebar. So thanks, Tech Monday!

The main Wii story is here. The sidebar, about the possible fate of the PlayStation 3, is over here. Please check 'em out.

My tips for watching the Super Bowl in HD.

In my inbox every week, I get an e-mail from Newsweek rounding up their top stories. I rarely read it because, shit, that's why I pay for the magazine, and really the e-mail is not much more than a tiny sneak preview and tease.

This week, though, I glanced at the subject line, "Bush's Truman show" and I thought, "All right, you got me, I'll bite."

In the e-mail itself, however, was a long message from editor Jon Meacham explaining why they put a Britney Spears/Lindsey Lohan/Paris Hilton story on the cover of Newsweek.

It talks about one of the authors of the story and an experience she had with her daughter, and you've got me all the way even with this wishy-washy quote:

I suspect that some readers will take a look at this week's cover and think we have, in the language of media critics, "gone soft." A quick, cynical interpretation might be: NEWSWEEK wanted to sell a lot of magazines, so we are playing the celebrity card with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears—an interesting interpretation, but an inaccurate one... Our essay is, rather, a serious-minded attempt to figure out how the prevailing celebrity ethos of women behaving badly is -- and is not -- affecting girls. We cover the country in full, and little is closer to home than the impact the culture has on our families.

Which, all right, that's cool. I feel you, Newsweek.

So why, when this longish explanation is the bulk of the e-mail message, was the e-mail titled, "Bush's Truman Show?" It sounds like you guys have thought this through, yet there's no courage-of-convictions to actually use the words "Britney," "Hilton" or "Lohan" (or even "Girls gone bad," the headline of the article) in the e-mail subject line. The whole message doesn't even explain that "Bush's Truman Show" is about, it just has a link to the story. Were they worried spam filters would catch these e-mails and keep them from getting to recipients?

If you're gonna "Go soft," Newsweek, at least own it in the subject line.

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I'm about candy the way some people are about pot. There's always so much of it around, that I usually don't care to pay for it.

But last night I caved and bought a bag of Jelly Belly candy because, damn, I'm only human.

Here's something interesting, though. They each are full of flavor and usually delicious, right? We are agreed?

Things only have like four calories each. I looked at the number of calories per service, and it's 140, which is pretty normal for candy.

But guess how many Jelly Bellys are in a serving. Just take a second. Guess.

Check it out:



35 beans!? I don't know about you, but unless I haven't eaten all day, I can't think of a time I've ever eaten 35 Jelly Belly candies at one time. That's a lot of flavor!

So this is good news for my own belly of jelly. I can live with those kind of numbers.