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I did hit my target of 14 books this month, bringing my total to 75 for the year. Some comments on those follow.
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Because they are glorious:

I still can’t believe the shot at 6:55 in the first one.

Meaning, that is, on the subject of money, a nice summary of one of the major issues of the year… here’s the first part of Bremner, Bird, and Fortune discussing this year’s financial crisis:

When I lived in Berlin, 1995-1996, I took quite an interest in the rather excellent public transport system there. I recall this as being fairly unremarkable, but friends who visited me at the time have since pointed out that it seemed like I knew all of the timetables inside out and that it was clearly on the other side of obsessive.
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Covering the solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, Yule, (FSM) Holiday, and any other wintertime around-now holidays that I’ve missed. Wherever you are, I hope you’re having fun and surrounded by people you love.

Dramatic title, I know, but I’ve been operating with greatly-diminished email capabilities since the end of June this year, when a spam burst knocked out my server—that’s what first forced the move to this “temporary” blog, and then in July a much worse burst of it made my mail more or less unmanageable on that server. It’s taken me until today to really recover from that.
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A very meta exploration of what the point of a game is: Achievement Unlocked.

Some time ago I posted one of the classic clips from Roger Federer’s return game, his unbelievable retrieval of a dunk slam by Andy Roddick. That post is on my still-yet-to-be-revived old site, so I can’t link to it, but in any case YouTube now has a clip of that entire return game by Federer, who blows Roddick off the court not just in that point but in all four. As far as I can tell, Roddick is leading 15-0 when the clip begins, and from there on it’s a ludicrous display of tennis from Federer:

To try to hit my year’s reading target, I planned out my December reading, and it seems to have worked well (I’m currently halfway through book 71, The Art of Learning), so I’m going to try planning out my reading for next year.
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In all my trips to Dublin Airport over the years, this one is the first one where, going through the “nothing to declare” channel, I saw actual Customs staff performing typical Customs duties (no pun intended)—that is, they accosted some people at random and brought them over to have their bags checked.
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