Curious George: TV miniseries? My wife and I finished off Deadwood. Now our TV is lonely and depression has set in. Any recommendations for a good TV or movie series that runs more than 5-10 hours? Can torrents be found for some of the more obscure stuff?

Metrosexual tarot carts. What does your future hold? And will that afghan go with that new lamp?

Bare hand live line work [video] is not a job for the squeamish. Power companies have found that it's cheaper to put workers directly on high-voltage lines, rather than shut off the power for repairs. The result -- a new high-adrenalin and hair-raising occupation. [idea via] more inside

Your favorite film? I'm looking for awesome films that I may not have seen before. I've seen the tired old AFI Top 100, and IMDB favorites are probably a bit too mainstream. What do you say? What are some of your personal favorites? New ones, oldies, indies, whatever are fine it's all good as long as it's English or English-subtitled.

Festivus turns 40 this year. The holiday was invented by the father of Daniel O’Keefe, a future Seinfeld writer. Many find it to be a simple family celebration, free of marketing corruption of Christmas. Traditions include the aluminum pole, the airing of grievances, and feats of strength. Meat loaf or spaghetti in a red sauce is traditional, but the writer Allen Salkin recommends a hearty beer, rum, bourbon, or wine. Now, I've got some problems with you people...

Curious George: Cool sounding words. Is there a lexicon of cool-sounding words that can serve as a title for an advanced version of a product? See inside... more inside

Devices (NSFW) for, er, remote copulatory needs. (Insert obligatory joke about getting the shaft from Windows.) more inside

Curious George: Automatons? Is it possible there are automatons among us? (Grab a Sam Adams and click "[more inside]")... more inside

Curious George: Occupational blogs? Do you have any recommendations for blogs that let me walk a mile in someone's occupational shoes? I want to read the ups and downs about working on a construction site, driving a train, being a flight attendant, being a mailman, whatever. I really haven't had much luck fishing this stuff out of the sea of teen angst and vaporous blogs. Recommendations?

Curious George: Help me choose a font! I'm trying to pick a typeface for paper/PDF documentation to go with a scientific software program I wrote. The non-serif typefaces are a bit hard on the eyes for some of the longer paragraphs, but classic serifs (Garamond/Palatino/etc) look really messy when I write various commands in all-caps. Is there a font that is well-suited to what I'm trying to do? And yeah, besides Comic Sans.

Curious George: Scary ghosts. I guess I'm about 35 days early, but what are the scariest ghosts or hauntings you've encountered in film and literature? more inside

Curious George: Serif font. Is there a serif font that doesn't look as boring as Zurich? I'm doing parts of the back cover of a short-run nonfiction book in Zurich Condensed and it's coming across as really bland.

Chengdu. I stumbled on this when searching for pandas, and found it to be a bleak, intimate look at scenes in the remote Sichuan province of south central China, adjacent to Tibet and away from the booming eastern districts that manufacture everything in your house. Yes, I found the pandas, but the other stuff was more compelling.

Insect closeups. Get to know the housefly, ant, hornet, honeybee, and many other friends up close and personal!

Control rooms ... from the ad-saturated (Moscow) to the colossal (NASA/Apollo) to the eccentric (XM Radio). A lot of operations like FedEx, Amtrak, BART, Time Warner Cable, and Delta Air Lines all have their own control rooms. What, you don't have one? You should!

Curious George: Nonverbal communication. Help, fellow simians... I need help with my nonverbal communications to help my marriage. more inside

Curious George: Blog question. Which of the free blogs allows forward-chronological order of posts, i.e. where a visitor sees the beginning of a story first? This is for a stupid personal project. I tried Googling but came up dry.

Dining out tonight? Read what might happen if you annoy your server. There's also rants from waitstaff about bad menus, bad kids, and bad stuff in the bathrooms Check out the list of which celebrities are bad tippers. Admittedly a very anecdotal site, but still worth a look. For the inside track on what it's like to be part of a restaurant's waitstaff, there's the Waiting Tables blog.

Curious George: Typeface. I'm trying to find the name of a typeface used by National Geographic in its paper maps. See this sample (e.g. "Thessaloniki") or this (all town names). All the samples I'm finding are too tiny to run through engines like WhatThe Font. more inside

Curious George: Confusing movies. I'm wondering if any other monkeys tend to get confused about plot points when seeing new films. more inside