In his review of Of Gods and Men, Anthony Lane uncorks this near-perfect description of the great Michael Lonsdale:

He looks like someone who knows all the mysteries of the universe but has decided, in the interests of public order and private amusement, to keep them to himself.

Lane was one of the best movie critics working until he found himself caught in a feedback loop of his snark. Passages like that remind you how great a writer he is.

So Starbucks is planning to get into the single-serve coffee business in a serious way–which probably means bringing out their own pod standard. That’s probably bad news for Keurig and really bad news for Tassimo, and Nespresso. Unclear whether or not it will be good for casual coffee drinkers–the people who are brewing single-server pods, for the most part, probably don’t know any better.

For whatever it’s worth, the Illy iperesspresso system does really serviceable espresso shots. I wouldn’t recommend it for the home (where you should have an actual espresso machine), but it beats anything else you might put in your office.

While the rest of Republican America is swooning for Chris Christie, Mark Levin isn’t buying it. Levin seems not to consider Christie a viable presidential candidate, which is perfectly sensible, since Christie isn’t going to run. But Levin’s discounting of Christie doesn’t seem to be based on political horserace calculations. Here are the clips from Galley Friend A.W.:

January 14: “The new GOP presidential hope? Are you kidding?”

February 16: “[H]e refuses to address issues that expose his weaknesses to conservatives.”

February 17: “For all the loud bravado, on this hugely important [Obamacare] issue he’s a wimp. . . . It’s fiscally irresponsible for Christie to sit on his butt and do nothing. Is this what they mean by frank talk?  Maybe his supporters inside the beltway can help us better understand while they’re touting him for president.”

It’s unclear if Levin’s appraisal of Christie as an “irresponsible wimp” is the result of Christie not coming onto his show or some deviationist thinking concerning the 2010 Delaware Senate race.

I’ve been busy with other projects.

Dynamic Forces is one of my secret vices—not because I believe the collectibles they’re hawking are on the fast-track to high-value, but because some of the stuff they sell is really pretty cool. For example, last week they were offering 18 copies of Uncanny X-Force #1. Nothing special there, except that they were “blank” variant covers. And nothing special about that, either, except that Joe Rubinstein did an original X-Men character sketch on each of them.

Rubinstein is a stud Marvel guy. Among other work, he inked Frank Miller’s pencils for the Wolverine limited series, which is one of my favorite books from the ’80s. Having an original drawing from him on the cover of an X book? Awesome.

The only catch was, when you ordered one of these books, you had no idea what sketch you were going to get. Dynamic Forces just shipped the 18 of them out randomly. I was kind of hoping for a Nightcrawler or Colossus, but figured that with my luck I’d get Toad. Instead, this is what arrived in the mail over the weekend:

Nerdtastic.

Why not bid on the original art for the cover of Ewoks #4.

If only you had the full run from the series in NM. Then you’d really feel like a winner.

First the candy. Maureen Tkacik’s NY Observer profile of Lawrence O’Donnell:

That Mr. O’Donnell somehow emerged from an Irish Catholic upbringing in working-class Boston calling himself “Lawrence” in the age of Larry Bird dovetails with his other known affectations: His earliest recorded flirtation with punditry is a 1985 New York Times op-ed on the superiority of designer Italian suits to the Brooks Brothers numbers he wore before an episode of Miami Vice inspired him to tour Barneys. (More recently WWD touched off a predictable memelet by noting the provenance of his socks as something called Seize sur Vingt.) His life took a fateful turn around the time of his sprucing up, when he took a sublet in the apartment of Maura Moynihan, whose cartoonish dilettantishness–she was a performance artist in the midst of a conversion to Tibetan Buddhism–no doubt cast her roommate in a favorable light when she introduced him to her late and lionized father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then senior senator from New York. By all accounts, he was smitten by his pompous pupil, and a reluctant politico-cum-pundit career was launched.

That’s what you get for opposing HillaryCare, bucko.

The good stuff is per Galley Friend A.K.’s recommendation of Kasparov’s own NYRB account of his loss to Deep Blue. It’s very, very good. Sample awesome:

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

And:

Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

Kasparov remains a hauntingly interesting mind.

One last thing: Ken Jennings has a piece in Slate. It’s clever and a fun read, but the most interesting part is this bit about Daily Doubles:

In the final round, I made up ground against Watson by finding the first “Daily Double” clue, and all three of us began furiously hunting for the second one, which we knew was my only hope for catching Watson. (Daily Doubles aren’t distributed randomly across the board; as Watson well knows, they’re more likely to be in some places than others.) By process of elimination, I became convinced it was hiding in the “Legal E’s” category, and, given a 50-50 chance between two clues, chose the $1200 one. No dice. Watson took control of the board and chose “Legal E’s” for $1600. There was the Daily Double. Game over for humanity.

In theory, I really applaud this Monica Potts pieces in the American Prospect because it’s a serious, but not totally joyless, exploration of an interesting aspect of videogames. But in practice, Potts seems so torn up by the politics of everything around her–Civilization, the Sims, 24, The Blind Side (a “racially problematic movie”)–I found myself wondering how exhausting she must find daily life.

Also, winning diplomatic (vote at the U.N.), technological (space race to Alpha Centauri), and cultural victories in Civ isn’t as hard as she makes it out to be on the game’s lower- to mid-levels.