It's not clear to me that this James McManus essay on poker and Iranian nukes works, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Die Hard #4: Reason #372 not to live in LA. Of course, hardly anybody is on the roads around LAX during Thanksgiving month. (Doesn't my brother's commute go right through there? Poor kid.)

Terry Gross interviews writers Greg Daniels and Mindy Kaling about "The Office." I hadn't realized Kaling was behind "Matt and Ben".

1. It is, of course, possible to order a triple-triple on the secret menu at In-n-Out; it's just a short 1.4-mile walk from the Ritz Huntington. I could sure go for a Flying Dutchman and Animal-style fries well-done, only about 1300 calories.

2. Another triple-triple is QUIXOTRY, a 365-point word that helped Michael Cresty reach a record 830 total. Slate has an analysis. I'm dismayed to learn that "ZA" and "ZAS" are now considered official Scrabble words. What's the point if you're going to make it that easy? Kids today! (I'm none too pleased over "VROW", either, which is a misspelled Dutch word, but that's at least in my 1991 Scrabble dictionary.)

	October 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	4.2%	13.6%	15.6%	14.6%
S&P 500	3.3%	12.1%	16.3%	12.8%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	4.4%	5.3%

Beat the S&P for the third month in a row.

New investments: Select-Comfort (SCSS) @ $20.70.

Sold: ATHR @ $20.50; Wal-Mart $45 call (WWTAI) @ $7.00

Quick flip: out and in of OSTK in response to a one-day move for a short-term profit

I need to have more faith in my choices. I sold my Wal-Mart call at a 17% profit in response to a stop-loss, but it popped up to $9 and is $7.80 now. The MO call I sold for a small profit went up another 30%: I really should have waited for the stay order I predicted to be issued. Between the two mistakes, I missed out on another 2% gain.

Calorie Restriction, where the most ardent followers plan their meals such that dinner is precisely 639 calories. "Dietary sudoku" sounds right. The WSJ ($) also -heh- weighs in. Update: also today's The New York Times.

I'm sentimental about October 29, and Slim and I went to a fun Decemberists concert: 110-minute set, lots of audience participation and chatter from the band, more instruments than you could shake a stick at, plus they played "Losing My Religion""We Go Down Together." We showed up 90 minutes after the doors opened, gravitated to a surprisingly good untaken vantage point at the 9:30 so the short Slim would have a chance to see the stage, and happily ran into our friend Rebekah, who had long ago discovered the spot for her concert-going. The band was on KCRW a few months ago.

The lost script for Aaron Sorkin's pilot about a baseball team.

Roger Friedman is reporting that Studio 60, with its 7.7M viewers, less than 60% of its Heroes lead-in, is due to be cancelled. I keep saying to myself that the show has to get better, but it repeatedly fails to do so, and the fact that Amanda Peet's pregnancy is going to get written into the show doesn't look promising. I never would have expected 30 Rock to be the better show, but Alec Baldwin is accomplishing that single-handedly.

Will I help or hurt S.D. Fla. U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta's political career if I mention the time we ran into Alec Baldwin outside a Los Angeles oxygen bar and Baldwin complimented his tie? (Congratulations to Alex on his recent swearing in. That's the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice you're looking at there if a Democratic president doesn't beat the GOP to it.)

I saw a preview of this with Shani Thursday night. I'm a big Emma Thompson fan, Will Farrell movies are a guilty pleasure, Dustin Hoffman mails in an enjoyable reprise of his "Huckabees" performance, the plot (of a real-life person who's hearing his life narrated by a novelist) is promising given my taste for that sort of Charlie-Kaufmanesque plot, and the trailer is great. Yet I was vaguely dissatisfied. The trailer is too good: if you've seen the 2:36 trailer, you've seen 80-90% of the good moments of the movie (depriving you of any enjoyable surprises), and the rest is so much filler, including an unconvincing love story, and a sentimental cop-out of an ending that smacks of focus group interference. It would have been much better as a ten-minute sketch.