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.

Late night links.

* Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions.

* It's good to live in a country without nobility or hereditary office.

* Are you a film addict? I am 55.2% yes.

* John Updike considers Mars.

* Matt, Josh, and Ezra consider the fillibuster and the extent to which we should just dump the damn thing.

* Coleman has gone to the Minnesota Supreme Court (a majority of whom have apparently been appointed by Tim Pawlenty) to ask that improperly rejected absentee ballots not be counted in the recount. I've looked, but I haven't actually found any sort of legitimate reason why he thinks ballots that were improperly rejected should stay improperly rejected, other than "I might win that way." Some commentary at TPM.

* Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen. We're so very screwed.