Along with the premier on Showtime next week, This American Life is now offering free podcasts. (thanks Lulu!!) Before you had to go through Audible.com to get them. I guess a little cash has been infused into this excellent program. Now you have no excuse to not be listening.

I've always enjoyed the magazine Wired, but I only just discovered the Wired Blog Network. I don't love the banner layout, but I will be going back for Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, Epicenter and maybe a few others.

Wayne of the Lips has some interesting things to say about how to create your own happiness. Sounds right on target to me. (via) Much better in fact than some other crap I've heard recently. I guess this is one way to make yourself happy, or wet in the crotch area, or maybe both. That might even be higher than than the ziplines we rode in Laos. But not by much.

And if you're not sure what to do, or how to figure out what would be best to make you happy, you can always check here.

Alright, the NCAA brackets are done and Quicksilver is calling my name. This book is unlike anything Neal Stephenson has written before, but I still love it. It's a fictionalized history of the origins of money, currency and how that all intersected with the mathematical and philosophical pursuits during the late 1600s and early 1700s. Yet somehow he manages to make it fun, interesting and exciting. What the main characters were doing and thinking about then was practically the science-fiction of that time. Stephenson captures that beautifully. For me, happiness is a big novel. Time to get back at it.