Quick ones.

* Naturally, Barack Obama is Time's Person of the Year. For a brief while I thought they might pick someone else for shock value, but come on, this was a gimme.

* Jaimee pointed this out to me today, and now I'm seeing it at Politico: if she's selected to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate—which seems, sadly, inevitable—Caroline Kennedy will have been in the Senate eight years in 2016, just like Clinton '08...

* Science fiction and glamor.

* TV Tropes has a whole subsection on comic book tropes.

* The best superhero graphic novels of 2008.

* And my vote for best news story of this or any year: Tiny Swiss watch found in undisturbed 400-year-old tomb.

Time continues its long slide into irrelevance with its 2007 Person of the Year pick, Vladmir Putin. Putin in and of himself is not such a bad choice—though runners-up Al Gore and J.K. Rowling would both have made a better choice—but the fawning language used in the profile would be merely embarrassing if it weren't so impressively power-worshipping and proto-fascist:

No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian President not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge.

psmealey in the thread on MetaFilter says it best: is this Time or Teen Beat? He's a dream! I love his eyes.