I've always loved the idea of naming a daughter Lyanna, after Ned Stark's long-dead sister. Beautiful name.

I'll cop to being amused that the NL East predictions for 2013 and 2014 are almost identical. Worked out fairly well for the Braves in '13, so here's hoping.

I worked in the SID's office at a major university when I was a student, and I was tasked to write the bio of a senior swimmer that would appear in the program at the last meet of the season. Except I was an unpaid "student assistant," so I wasn't going to be trusted with a good swimmer, and so I was given a really…

God dammit. Why couldn't they just give me their sleek black frames at an affordable price with a discount on top of that AND not be huge assholes at the same time?

Sigh. I'm going to have stop getting my posters framed at Hobby Lobby, aren't I?

Ah, the perfect face for expressing a wide range of feelings, including:

I'm leaving the only home I've ever known to join a quasi-monastic order of knights;

And purple is the color of bad-asses.

There was an unfortunate incident a few years back where a porn star and fetish model did an interview with a weekly paper in San Francisco (the writer had previously labeled some of the fetish porn a local company did as "torture porn," and she objected) and the writer used her real name without her permission. The…

And it's even tougher to embrace her in the show because you don't have the advantage of a narrative account of her thoughts. Book Sansa might be more than a little infuriating, but at least Martin can provide a clear sense of what she's thinking. Show Sansa doesn't have that advantage, so you just get a stammering…

Not weird at all. Or, rather, if you're weird then so am I. Which is possible.

I assume this season will include one of my favorite scenes from the books, Sansa and the snow castle. I hope Sophie Turner is up to it; it's a wonderful, heartbreaking moment, and I'd hate to see it botched.

Wait, I'm supposed to be attracted to a woman with a clean mouth? Where's the fun in that? That's boring. Give me profane and smart-ass any day.