ONE DAY, YOU, LIKE ME, WILL DISCOVER TEDTALKS, and, just like me when I was you, you won't know where to begin. If I were you, and you were me, I'd start with these:

• Ze Frank: What's so funny about the Web? (2/04)
• Janine Benyus: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature (2/05)
• Scott McCloud: Understanding comics (2/05)
• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen (2/06)
• Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind (3/07)
• Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (3/07)
• Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat (12/07)
• Doris Kearns Goodwin: Learning from past presidents in moments of crisis (2/08)
• John Hodgman: A brief digression on matters of lost time (2/08)
• Paula Scher: Great design is serious (not solemn) (5/08)
• Jennifer 8. Lee: Who was General Tso? and other mysteries of American Chinese food (7/08)
• Ueli Gegenschatz: Fulfilling the dream of flight in a high-tech wingsuit (2/09)
• Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius (2/09)
• Eric Lewis: Striking chords to rock the jazz world (2/09)
• Dan Ariely: Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes) (3/09)
• Stanley McChrystal: Listen, learn ... then lead (03/11)

Also available on Ye Olde iTunes.

"THE EARLY BIRD GETS THE WORM, but the second mouse gets the cheese." Different circumstances present different risks and opportunities, and in this brave new world of psychobiology and genetics, how and why we respond to any specific circumstance seems to be increasingly explained by what's in our genes rather than what kind of diapers we wore growing up. In other words, nature seems to be edging out nurture as the chief culprit for shaping our behavior and identities. But, of course, the whole story is a little more complicated than that. Steven Pinker talks about the somewhat muddled implications of getting to know your genome in his New York Times Magazine article "My Genome, My Self". Mapping our individuality through our genes at first seems like a straightforward proposition (i.e. this gene makes you fat, this one makes you good at math). But the endeavor quickly becomes a rabbit hole that leads you from piece to piece to piece – all of which refuse to neatly add up and explain a concept like intelligence, let alone demystifying what makes you you:

The search for I.Q. genes calls to mind the cartoon in which a scientist with a smoldering test tube asks a colleague, “What’s the opposite of Eureka?”

REDBELT is an unusual little flick – a samurai/noir/fight film with turn-of-the-screw plotting, some enjoyable martial arts scrapping, trademark Mametian masculinity throughout (for better and for worse), and, yes, a somewhat dopey ending. But I dug it. Every scene contains both surprise and a sense of inevitability, and the characters and themes resonate with a singular, uncomplicated understanding of decency – a notion usually ignored, upstaged, or over-sentimentalized in movies. Here, despite all the twist and turns, decency remains the simple principle on which all the action pivots, and by the end, it becomes a virtue raised almost to the level of nobility.

EBERT LOBS BON MOTS on cinematic bombs:

No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out. (Armageddon)

And a lovely existential one:

Mad Dog Time is the first movie I've seen that doesn't improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. It is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.

MIDTOWN HOLIDAYS

Humans
hobbling
along
the
sidewalks —

Some
drunks,
who
fell over
once
too often,
now perpetually stumble
even sober.

Some
just
shopping
and
looking around
but
not at where they're
going.

Bastards!

THE HOT STOVE AIN'T SO HOT these days, as everyone sits around waiting for someone else to blink.

MAN ALLEGEDLY ASSAULTS GIRLFRIEND WITH BURGER, as reported by the Onion. Sorry, I mean, the New York Times.

THERE'S LEX LUTHOR, Auric Goldfinger, Danny Ocean, Bernie Madoff, and Cobra Commander. And then there's Jack Handey:

The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen:

—The door to the vault must have accidentally been left open by the cleaning woman.

—The guard must bend over to tie his shoes and somehow he gets all the shoelaces tied together. He can’t get them apart, so he takes out his gun and shoots all his bullets at the knot. But he misses. Then he just lies down on the floor and goes to sleep.

—Most of the customers in the bank must happen to be wearing Nixon masks, so when we come in wearing our Nixon masks it doesn’t alarm anyone. . . .

More criminal genius here.

LET'S WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER — er, I mean, the black dude! Salon takes a peek at the wacky world of "Racists for Obama" – just a little light reading to distract you on the day the nation attempts to save its soul:

Sean Quinn, of the polling site FiveThirtyEight, respected for its obsessiveness and eerie prescience, recently posted a hair-raising story about a pair of Barack Obama supporters. Quinn seems ready to verify its source, but only after the election. At any rate, it goes like this: A man canvassing for Obama in western Pennsylvania asks a housewife which candidate she intends to vote for. She yells to her husband to find out. From the interior of the house, he calls back, "We're voting for the nigger!" At which point the housewife turns to the canvasser and calmly repeats her husband's declaration.

Ah, racism. It's always a step ahead of us. Even before the majority of Democrats decided that Obama was electable despite being the first openly black presidential candidate, pollsters began gradually raising the level of speculation about the tide of bigotry that might overwhelm white voters once they got into that private little booth and faced the prospect of pulling a lever that suddenly seemed to read "Some Black Dude". . . .

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is the kind of weird, mind-bending and heartbreaking movie where you walk out of the movie theatre and don't feel quite right. Like, maybe the sky is the wrong color, or that person across the street can read your mind, or nothing is real and you're actually dead. (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Solaris were a little like this for me, too.) It's like Borges, Fellini, Dalí and Willy Loman made a movie together – bizarro, great and kind of a fantastic bummer.

A HIGH-SCHOOL BOY carrying a picture of his crush is badly burned in a fire, and doctors use her photo to reconstruct his face. Now identical to his crush, he moves in with her by pretending to be her long-lost twin sister.

- Plot summary of the manga series Pretty Face (via Comic Foundry)

NINE INNINGS AND THREE DAYS LATER, there's revelry on the streets of Philadelphia:

All around the city and suburbs, fireworks exploded, horns honked and pots and pans banged as if it were New Year's Eve. . . . In Northeast Philadelphia, thousands more gathered at the intersection of Frankford and Cottman Avenues, where city workers had greased the light poles to keep fans from dangerous, inebriated ascents.

There's a city that really knows its fans.

A SWING AND A MISS on ball four turns into a strike 'em out-throw 'em out double play. A take-out slide into second base would have done more good as a regular slide. A check-swing third strike ends the inning with bases loaded. And nearly every player was served at least one fat pitch which escaped unharmed. After all the missed opportunities, time eventually runs out on you. Ms. Benjamin handles the post-mortem for the Globe, and YFSF looks back on a good ride.

ASHES OF TIME (REDUX) is a weird bird, even for Wong Kar Wai. Veering from silly and melodramatic to simple and affecting – almost moment to moment and shot to shot – the movie has over-stylized camera work, preposterous sword-fighting, stirring heroics, over-the-top emotion, specious logic, a scene with a girl getting all sensual with her horse and many more scenes of a different girl standing around with a very sad donkey. Eventually the impulse to guffaw is overcome by the desire to weep, and the movie builds toward an unlikely and surprisingly emotional ending. As the review in the Village Voice puts it:

Wong has a bit of a wink with all of the deadpan death threats and grand allusions — women rake their cheeks along tree bark, limestone, and a horse's neck in fits of longing — before turning mannerism into the very stuff of transcendence, as with Maggie Cheung's penultimate lament. It's a knowing end-run around cliché that seeks to assert the damnable truth of cliché itself. In a move that would become his trademark, Wong rejects the happy ending for the almost ecstatically sad, making your heart soar even as he tells you, essentially, that it's impossible, all of it — that it'll never work.

SURELY, ALL OF THIS EXTRA BASEBALL IS GRAVY, as YFSF puts it. Nevertheless, hopes are high for a final game 7 (which should have been a final game 5), because we've been here before and it usually works out pretty well. But before we lose ourselves too much in anticipation, let's also remember where we came from, and how good it's been since:

It was on the bus the other day, heading from Fenway Park to the airport after their miraculous Game 5 win, that Kevin Youkilis reflected on all that he's been a part of - three comebacks from the depths of elimination - to Varitek, sitting next to him.

"I said, 'We're so spoiled,' " Youkilis said. "It's amazing. It's really amazing the games we play, and how much fun it's been. When we're all old and our children are all grown up, we'll sit around and meet up and talk about games like the game the other day. It's a wild ride, and we're very spoiled."

THE BEST BASEBALL STATISTICS CHART EVER tracks the win probability during the best elimination-game comeback ever. Sure, it seems like the cold, calculated view of a Sabermetrics-loving number cruncher. But when you look at it another way, it's an emotional barometer, as well – illustrating precisely how we felt at each point in the game, from sofa-slumping despair to furtive hopefulness and, finally, the bewildering heights of improbable, undeserved joy.

BEFORE GAME 5 OF THE 2008 ALCS BECAME A MAGIC ACT, while the Rays were still doing the pummeling and the Red Sox were the only ones at Fenway who didn't know the season was over, I averted my eyes from the grim disaster unfolding on TV by reading Bill Simmons thoughts on the season's other great loss:

I still miss Manny. I can't lie. It took me four solid weeks to accept that he was really gone. Three weeks after the trade happened, I flicked on NESN for the opening pitch of a Sox game, noticed the SkyDome and thought, "Yes, Manny loves hitting in the SkyDome!" A second passed. A lightbulb went on. My shoulders slumped. Manny was gone.

All 9,000 words of his story are worth reading (and he even includes one of my favorite Manny anecdotes in a footnote), but here I'll skip to the end:

So, how will this play out? I see Manny leading the Dodgers to the 2008 World Series, breaking their hearts and donning pinstripes next season. He won't feel bad, because he's Manny. The L.A. fans will feel bad. I will feel worse. It will be the single most painful sports transaction of my lifetime. It will make me question why I follow sports at all, why we spend so much time caring about people who don't care about us. I don't want to hear Manny booed at Fenway. I don't want to root against him. I don't want to hold a grudge. I don't want to hear the "Mah-knee! Mah-knee!" chant echoing through the new Stadium. I am not ready for any of it. You love sports most when you're 16, then you love it a little bit less every year. And it happens because of things like this. Like Manny breaking the hearts of everyone in Boston because his agent wanted to get paid, then Manny landing in New York because the Yanks offered the most money.

PHILADELPHIA IS AN EVEN MORE UNFORGIVING baseball town than Boston? I guess, take it from one who knows. Terry Francona managed the Phillies from 1997–2000, with a 285-363 record:

So he was "genuinely happy" to see [the Phillies] experience success of their own. He may not have shared that sentiment for a city that didn't show him a lot of love. In explaining the differences between the fans in the two cities, Francona said, "I think there's more love for their players here. They want [them] to do good so bad that when they don't, it just kills them. In Philadelphia, it turned to hatred in a hurry. Like ball one."

"FENWAY PARK, IN BOSTON, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." The magic of tilt shift photography (click link above) brings to mind John Updike's description of Fenway in his farewell to Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu":

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. . . .

WE'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, and it always feels this horrible. Amalie Benjamin (the shining jewel of the Boston Globe sports section, by the way) assesses the situation:

They have been in this spot before. A tight spot, and an unforgiving one. The Red Sox have been down and have made it out, as recently as last year's American League Championship Series, when they yielded three of the first four games to the Indians, and in the 2004 ALCS, when they lost the first three games to the Yankees. At those points, it did not seem as if the Sox were on the brink of a comeback.

Nor does it seem that way today.

In other words, every time this happens, it feels completely and utterly hopeless.

So that should be comforting, right? Right?