Putting it plainiac, you’d be insaniac not to obtainiac. It’s entertainiac.

Early next year — just in time not to be just in time for the holidays, unfortunately — Ken Jennings also has a new upcoming trivia almanac, in hardbac.

If you’re a quiz-bowl type, the whole book is a cardstac.

Fun while eating hardtac in a guardshac.

I will stop now, before you complainiac.

From last weekend, here’s one of the most exciting plays in football in years — an amazing 15-lateral, 62-second-long, come-from-behind last play desperation miracle to end a Division III game between Trinity University and Millsaps College:

Compare and contrast with this string of rugby highlights I grabbed pretty much at random.  (These happen to be  from the 2002 New Zealand domestic club competition.) These are all great plays, but also perfectly typical of the game’s speed and excitement, the sort of thing rugby fans the world over take almost for granted.

You see the resemblance.

While I’m thinking of Trebekistan today, a reminder:

Nineteen-game winner David Madden is still out there hiking the length of the entire east coast — from Maine’s border with Canada all the way to Key West — while raising money for Fisher House, a top-rated non-profit that provides nearby lodging so that loved ones can be nearby while wounded military veterans undergo extended treatment for war-related injuries.

Last David checked in, he was strolling along a detour through Amish country. Sounds like an amazing trip.  If you’d like to see what such a hike looks like, David’s way-cool photo albums from the walk so far are here, here, and here.

Wherever we stand on the political spectrum, I hope this is something every American can support.

I hope you’ll join me in chipping in, if you have one minute right now, plus a couple of dollars you’d like to share.

Thanks!

If you’ve read Prisoner of Trebekistan, Lyn Payne is:

I hope she won the whole giant kaboodle.  Will be watching.  Go Lyn!

The Australian dollar sat around US $0.75 the last couple of times I was down there.

I peeked back over the summer, and it was sitting around US $0.83.

Today I glance down, and it’s at US $0.92. That’s a big move — over 10 percent, just in the last few months.

If current trends continue (and thanks to enormous trade and budget deficits, they probably will), it may not be long before the Canadian dollar is joined by the Australian dollar in passing parity in its US exchange rate.

At least this one has kangaroos on it. Five of them, in fact. So, bouncy, at least.

Last year, Princeton economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman notably suggested that the dollar would eventually suffer a "Wile E. Coyote moment," when dollar holders would suddenly notice they’d long ago run over the cliff and hadn’t had anything under their feet in some time.

Here’s a recent amplification on that, including a brief look at theories as to what’s keeping the coyote in the air, by one of Krugman’s colleagues, the head of Europe’s Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Yikes.  Don’t look down, I guess.