Next week on Mad Men.

I think that Mad Men is the only show whose weekly teasers make me less interested in seeing the next episode.

Incidentally, Mad Men and Top Chef are now available on demand, but there’s still some shadiness: The Office‘s awful two-part wedding episode, available for free on Hulu, costs $.99 per part on Comcast’s on demand service.

2009 Week 7 NFL picks.

Last year, I was working in an office with a full-fledged weekly pool, and jointly blogged my picks for each week. This year, I’m no longer in said office, and my new gig is pretty devoid of NFL fans. That said, because I joined my first-ever fantasy league, I spend enough time thinking about this crap each week that I’m resurrecting the tradition. We’ll see how long it lasts.

In addition, last year’s pool was just a straightforward pick-’em, with no spread involved. To make it more interesting, I’ll be going against the spread this year. I expect to fare poorly. As always, picks in bold after the jump.

More…

The party of no tech support.

Is there anything funnier than watching Republicans trying to figure out Twitter?

Yes, there sure is: watching Republicans trying to build a website. The new GOP.com was…let’s say undercooked upon its launch.

• RNC Chairman Michael Steele pops up in a format typically associated with dancing hamsters and offers to consolidate your bills/get a fake Internet degree/get a new mortgage. He also has a blog called “What Up.” (The blog has been renamed “Change the Game.” I’m 99% sure they didn’t catch the irony). His opening sentence? “The internet has been around for a while, now.”
• The “Future Leaders” section of the website was empty. (It’s now been updated, in a Time-style cop-out, to “You.”)
• The Republican Party hosted a kick-off conference call to announce its grand new venture (it’s “become a personal thing” to Steele!), the website was down. The first question during the conference call was a Hispanic woman who asked why there was no Spanish-language version of the site.
• The site’s admin information was posted for the public to see.
• Gawker noted that Jackie Robinson was posted as one of the GOP’s “Heroes.” You know, the guy who left the party and said this about the 1964 Republican Convention:”A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

Let’s put it succinctly:

Android steps to the iPhone.

I missed this, but Farhad Manjoo points out that Verizon is going to be rocking Android phones in a few weeks.

That is pretty awesome, although it also likely means that Apple will double down with AT&T instead of bringing the iPhone to a non-shitty network.

The best explanation of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize that I’ve seen thus far:

The Nobel Peace Prize’s aims are expressly political. The Nobel committee seeks to change the world through the prize’s very conferral, and, unlike its fellow prizes, the peace prize goes well beyond recognizing past accomplishments. As Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the 1990s, once proudly admitted, “The prize … is not only for past achievement. … The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] … Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.”

The whole thing’s worth a read, especially the bit about the prize’s unintended consequences. Andrew Sullivan likes the pick:

There are two obvious points: this is premature and this is thoroughly deserved.

Both are right. I don’t think Americans fully absorbed the depths to which this country’s reputation had sunk under the Cheney era. That’s understandable. And so they also haven’t fully absorbed the turn-around in the world’s view of America that Obama and the American people have accomplished. Of course, this has yet to bear real fruit. But you can begin to see how it could; and I hope more see both the peaceful intentions and the steely resolve of this man to persevere.

I’m not sold yet, but I do enjoy watching the right wing froth at the mouth.