I hope all of you are having a restful holiday. This Thanksgiving, I’m feeling culturally appreciative of the following things:

1) The bureaucracy nerd in me is thankful that we’re getting a movie based on Team of Rivals, and that Daniel Day Lewis is going hard by starting out in Illinois. The bureaucracy nerd in me is also concerned with who will be playing Lincoln’s Cabinet secretaries. Lincoln’s important for that story. But the men behind him are critical too.

2) I’m thankful we’ve got a romantic comedy coming out that’s set in Washington. Any time I get to see Reese Witherspoon in my town, and Owen Wilson in a Nationals uniform, it’s a good though.

3) I’m incredibly psyched that Ron Chernow’s got another ginormous biography out, this time of our first president. I fully intend to alternate Washington: A Life, and Cryptonomicon.

And on a personal note, I’m so glad for all of you. Talking to you guys via comments and email, and getting to know some of you in real life, has been an incredible gift over the last year and a half. You make me a better writer, a better thinker, and on some days, a much better person. Thank you.

Time travel movies invariably make very little sense, and Source Code looks goofier and more arbitrary than is average:

I mean, why would you build a technology that lets someone go into dead people? And why for the last 8 minutes of their lives? How do you not die if you’re in that person when they die?  Would a government agency really think it’s acceptable collateral damage to sacrifice a train-full of people to prevent a theoretical future attack? Wouldn’t you have more people working on it than this?

That said, I would watch Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright in pretty much anything. In a weird way, I think  Farmiga has a lot in common with Tilda Swinton. They’re both supremely cool actresses when they want to be. Farmiga’s not as much of an awesome acting alien as Swinton is, she’s somewhat more approachable. But she’s definitely a woman who can plausibly cut dead George Clooney, or run a sketchy military installation without a hair falling out of place. I’d love to see her really fencing with someone like Renee Russo did in The Thomas Crown Affair. We need more grown-up movies, and more smolder before the conflagration.

I think Shani’s probably right that cable companies are in serious-long term trouble due to a failure to adapt to multiple new platforms. That said, I think the solution is actually pretty simple. If I were a cable exec, I’d do a couple of things. First, I’d develop a really terrific, flexible, strong player that will give viewers confidence that they can get the same credible user experience online or on their mobile devices that they get on a television screen.

Second, I’d move to a la carte subscriptions. I couldn’t care less about most of the stations I have access to, but I’d definitely pay another $10 a month for BBC America. I’d probably pay $5 a month for access to all the installments of Real Housewives whenever I wanted to see them. I’d pay $10 a month for USA. And I’d definitely pay for Community and 30 Rock even if I didn’t get access to any other NBC programming. I bet plans like that would lure viewers who have dropped their cable back. Across the board, cable profits might go down some, and I bet iTunes profits would go down a lot. But if I could pay networks directly and immediately for what I want from them, that might not be such a terrible tradeoff for those networks. And anything that gets me more Kandi Burruss and Bethanny Frankel is a good thing.