Speaking of crossword puzzles, the writer/director of Wordplay, Patrick Creardon, has a new documentary that opens today, I.O.U.S.A., about the national debt.

I just saw this headline:

Michael Phelps’ Girlfriend: He Addresses Rumors, Beard Says “Ew” No

And I was like, “A beard? Michael Phelps is gay?”

Rachel Maddow, or “lesbian Jew goddess of my dreams,” as Andy once called her, is getting her own show on MSNBC right after Keith Olbermann. She starts on September 8, after the political conventions end.

This is great. I heart Rachel Maddow — even though she copies Olbermann’s pinstriped suits. They both sometimes look like they’ve escaped from the road company of “Guys and Dolls.”

There was a Sesame Street wedding last weekend. I mean a real-life wedding that took place on the Sesame Street set between two workers on the show. Oscar the Grouch participated.

It wasn’t until I got to the end that I realized that the officiating minister is also the minister at the church where my chorus rehearses. He even used to sing with us.

While watching TV tonight, we saw a totally retro promo for the American version of the British TV series, Life on Mars, about a police detective who goes back in time to 1973 after being hit by a car. The promo even features what sounds like Ernie Anderson doing the voiceover. Anderson, the iconic 1970s/80s ABC TV promo announcer, has been dead for 11 years, so I don’t know who they got to copy his voice.

There’s even a retro version of the ABC logo at the end. Awesome.

A gay man has won the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat from Colorado. If he wins, he’ll be the third openly gay member of Congress. (That doesn’t include all the closeted gay Republicans, of course.)

Jared Polis, 33, is the founder of BlueMountain.com.

Mr. Polis, who poured more than $5 million of his own money into the campaign, narrowly defeated Joan Fitz-Gerald, the former State Senate president, and Will Shafroth, a conservationist, winning just over 40 percent of the vote.

Mr. Polis, who made a fortune co-founding an online greeting card Web site, bluemountain.com, and was elected to the State Board of Education in 2000, is favored to win in November against the Republican candidate, Scott Starin, as well as candidates from the Green and Unity Parties, in the mainly Democratic Second Congressional District. …

According to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a group that supports gay candidates for public office, Mr. Polis would be the first openly gay man elected to Congress as a nonincumbent.

There have been five other gay and lesbian members of Congress, including the current Representatives Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, both of them Democrats. All but Ms. Baldwin did not go public with their sexuality until they were elected.

Here’s Polis’s campaign website.

In my previous post, I told a little anecdote illustrating that when I was as a kid, I thought I was very smart, sometimes even smarter than adults, and yet I’d never heard of the concept of Ï€r². But I worried that some people might not get the joke, so I decided to sneak in a little explanation at the end of the post.

And I messed up.

I implied that Ï€r² belongs to algebra, when it really belongs to geometry.

I knew this, of course, but for some reason I was thinking of the wrong type of math.

The irony is that in writing a post about how this one time I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself, I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself.

I corrected the error so that nobody would ever know the difference. Except I know of at least one person who saw the error, because he e-mailed me to correct me, and therefore I worried that there might have been others who saw the error, so I felt compelled to write this explanation. Which means that those of you who hadn’t read the post before I changed it, or who don’t use RSS feed readers, now also know I made an error.

This whole post feels like something Faustus would write, except that I didn’t end it by saying that my error means nobody will ever, ever love me.

(I kid, Joel. I kid.)

When I was a kid I was sometimes too smart for my own good.

One evening I was at my friend’s house while his parents were throwing a party. I was talking with a man who was trying to explain something to me on some esoteric topic. He had a foreign accent, so I thought maybe he wasn’t a native English speaker.

That’s why when he said something to me, I, the elementary school kid, decided to correct his grammar.

“You mean pies are squared?” I said.

Bless him for not smacking me.

I did learn geometry eventually.

Lately I’ve been teaching myself Latin.

I don’t know why. It’s a daunting task, because there’s so much to memorize. The problem isn’t the vocabulary — many Latin words have English-language cognates, so they’re not hard to remember; the problem is the fricking grammar. Latin is an inflected language, which means that there are numerous endings for nouns and verbs, depending on their function in the sentence. The verbs aren’t particularly hard — it’s the noun endings, the declensions, that are killer. They seem impossible to memorize. And some of the endings are identical in some instances but not in others. There is no logic to it at all.

No wonder it’s a dead language.

Why am I doing this? It’s not like I need to. I’m not in school, I’m not preparing for the SAT, and if I want to read the great works of Roman literature, there are plenty of translations. But I’ve always been curious about Latin and how it works. I’ve sung many pieces in Latin; I like the way it looks and sounds; it’s the basis for so many English words; and it just seems elegantly put together, with so much information packed into one word.

A few years ago I decided to study ancient Greek. I decided that I wanted to learn the two classical languages, and I figured I’d be really ambitious and start with the one that came first, because perhaps it would inform my eventual study of Latin. (I like to get to the bottom of things.) I bought this book and began working my way through it, but it got harder and harder, and there was more and more to memorize, and eventually I wondered why I was doing it, and I gave up.

But the other weekend I read a review of a new book, Reading the OED. I took a look at it, because the OED has always fascinated me. But instead of that book, I decided to read The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. Thus my interest in language was rekindled, and I decided it was time to study Latin. So I took this book out of the library the other day and have started going through it.

I’ve always felt that I missed something in my formal education. I never took a survey course in Western civilization, never read many of the so-called “great books,” never studied Greece and Rome, never learned about Western philosophy. Occasionally over the last few years I’ve tried to rectify this. I’ve read an introductory survey of Western philosophy, I’ve read about the great books and I’ve read some of the works themselves. The idea of the “Western canon” is passé these days, but it’s still the foundation of our culture. And I like to see the big picture, the connections among things. I think that’s why I enjoy history so much — because it tells us how we got from there to here.

And part of me thinks that in some way, studying all of this stuff — especially the ancient Greeks and Romans — can make me a better person, by making me a clearer thinker and a better writer. I envy people who did study all of this. I really envy those who went to St. John’s College, where you get immersed in the canon.

But can it really make you better or smarter? I think I’m already a clear thinker, and perhaps my writing would benefit less from classical languages and literature and more from actual writing, and courage, and discipline. But maybe I’m wrong? Perhaps it really can help?

I don’t know.

But I do love language.

Here’s this week’s review of Mad Men from TV critic Alan Sepinwall.

I’m not a big sports fan, but for some reason I love watching the Olympics.

Maybe it’s because of the prestige. Maybe it’s because the events are much shorter. Maybe it’s because gymnasts and swimmers are hot.

My favorite Olympic sport to watch is men’s gymnastics. Male gymnasts are short and built. Unfortunately, both Hamm brothers are injured and neither is competing this year. I miss them. But I like watching women’s gymnastics as well. A woman performing on the balance beam is the most astonishing thing. I don’t know how she can leap up off the beam, do a 360-degree backflip, and then land right back on the beam. Mesmerizing.

As for swimming — what an amazing men’s relay last night. It was the kind of moment that makes the Olympics worth watching. Those last few seconds, where Jason Lezak, the American swimmer, overtook French swimmer Alain Bernard in the very next lane to win the relay for the American team, after Bernard had trash-talked the Americans, were INCREDIBLE.

Even crazier was Michael Phelps’s reaction.

It both cracked me up and terrified me. He looked like a Greek warrior ready to rush into battle and kill someone. Testosterone overload! And the man has not an ounce of fat on his body.

(Here’s a great article about Phelps from a couple of weeks ago that begins, “Michael Phelps is not a fish.”)

Oh, and there’s this French swimmer, Laure Manaudou. Whenever they mention her name, I start singing “Manaudou” to the tune of “Xanadu.”

The best part of watching the Olympics is that everything looks incredible on the new HDTV we bought a couple of months ago. We can see the water droplets on the swimmers as they’re being interviewed, we can see panoramic shots of Beijing. It’s great.

I lauged out loud when I read this about a group of Chinese citizens watching the Olympic opening ceremonies in a bar:

As they huddled over a group of tables pushed together, they placed bets on the veracity of a rumor that a trained panda would light the final torch.

Google Maps added Street View in Japan this week. Since I lived in Tokyo for three years, I’m psyched.

Except for two very brief occasions, I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in four years. But this book looks fascinating: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by Tom Vanderbilt.

The entire prologue is online. An excerpt:

You may suspect that getting people to merge in a timely fashion, and without killing one another, is less of a traffic problem and more of a human problem. The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life–different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability–mingle so freely.

Another:

[I]t is actually an incredibly complex and demanding task: We are navigating through a legal system, we are becoming social actors in a spontaneous setting, we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward, and we’re engaging in a huge amount of sensory and cognitive activity–the full scope of which scientists are just beginning to understand.

Finally:

Traffic has even shaped the food we eat. “One-handed convenience” is the mantra, with forkless foods like Taco Bell’s hexagonal Crunchwrap Supreme, designed “to handle well in the car.”

Makes me think of those obese humans hovercrafting their way around the mother ship in WALL-E.