The best of Netflix Instant for 2011

Looking back at my viewing logs, it's amazing to me how much I used Netflix to watch old TV shows this year. There are two reasons for it: A) Again, the three surgeries really killed my concentration and steered me to "comfort food." B) My son, now 3, is old enough to understand stuff I don't want him to be exposed to. So that means grownup movies often wait until he goes to sleep. Which is often too late to start a movie.

That said, I know people complain about the selection at Netflix Instant, but I don't usually have a hard time finding something I like to watch. Here were some of my favorite Netflix movies of 2011:

"I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK"

"Jet Li's Fearless"

Woody Allen's "Love and Death"

"A Room with a View"

"Eat Drink Man Woman"

"The Red Balloon"

"Wing Chun"

"Bodyguards and Assassins"

"The Dirty Dozen"

"The Black Stallion"

"A World Without Thieves"

"Salt"

"Patton"

"Drunken Master"

"Harvey"

"The Italian Job" (Michael Caine original)

"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (Walter Matthau original)

"The Bride of Frankenstein"

"Let The Right One In"

"The Twilight Samurai"

"Mean Streets"

"Kelly's Heroes"

"The Specials"

"Election" and "Triad Election"

"Hudson Hawk"

Some good TV I watched on Netflix: The entirety of "Mad Men" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," as well as Season One of "Breaking Bad."

And it's worth mentioning a couple of movies I saw on Amazon Video on Demand and Vudu that were pretty good: "13 Assassins," "Rango," and "Ip Man 2."

So it was a very Chinese/Japanese movie year for me, with some World War II sprinkled in. Not too bad.

Books I read in 2011

This was a really terrible book-reading year for me. Three surgeries clouded my head enough to make sustained concentration difficult: I started a lot of books, but finished precious few. The only novels I finished were, frankly, pulpy stuff. I hope to get my game back in 2012.

Here are some of the books I read to completion this year:

"Bossypants" by Tina Fey.

"The Conscience of a Liberal" by Paul Krugman.

"Winner-Take-All Politics" by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker.

"Cooking Solves Everything" by Mark Bittman (Kindle Single).

"The Gated City" by Ryan Avent (Kindle Sngle).

"The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen (Kindle Single).

"Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain.

"Star Trek: The Lost Years" by J.M. Dillard.

"Power Wars" by Charlie Savage (Kindle Single).

"The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" by Alan Jacobs.

"Empire of Illusion" by Chris Hedges.

"The Score" by Richard Stark.

UPDATE: "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Surprised I forgot this one, since it unsettled me so.

It's cheating, really, to count the Kindle Singles. Like I said: It was a horrible reading year for me. I have an excuse, but it still feels like I wasted time. Grrr. 2012, excelsior!

UPDATE II: A week later, I've added Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night," Justin Blessinger's "The Favorite," and Founding Fathers' "The Federalist Papers" to my list of completed books for 2011. That makes the list a bit less lame.

Ditch the payroll tax cut. Keep the unemployment benefits.

I'm already on record thinking the continued payroll tax holiday is a really bad idea. I think it undermines the long-term viability of Social Security, and more than a few critics agree with me. But I'm really, really against continuing the tax holiday if the price is cutting unemployment benefits to 3 million people.

As a macroeconomic matter, which is going to have a bigger impact on the economy? Lots of workers having a few extra bucks to spend? Or 3 million workers losing all the bucks they have to spend? I very much doubt the stimulative effect of the first outweighs the recessionary effects of the latter.

The payroll tax cut is a bad idea. Achieving it by cutting a bad deal is even worse.

Are you paying for some football?

Are you ready for some football?

You are paying for it regardless.

Although “sports” never shows up as a line item on a cable or satellite bill, American television subscribers pay, on average, about $100 a year for sports programming — no matter how many games they watch. A sizable portion goes to the National Football League, which dominates sports on television and which struck an extraordinary deal this week with the major networks — $27 billion over nine years — that most likely means the average cable bill will rise again soon.

via nytimes.com

Well, I'm not paying for it: I don't have cable. (Though I do pay an Internet bill to Comcast, so it's possible a few of my dollars go to football. But only indirectly.)

There's been increased talk about a la carte cable purchasing lately, which would allow TV viewers to buy the channels they want and not pay for the channels they don't. But that's hardly even necessary anymore. Between Hulu and Netflix—along with the occasional timely purchases from iTunes or Amazon Video on Demand—I watch what I want to watch and don't worry about access to the stuff I don't. The only problem I occasionally run into is sports, but A) a surprising amount of that is legal and free online, B) I can always walk down to the tavern to see the other stuff, usually, and C) I don't watch that much sports.

We've gotten quickly used to having every bit of media ever created at our immediate disposal, but it's good to remember that (until recently) scarcity has been the rule rather than the exception. But having a little scarcity in my video consumption has saved me money and let me focus on stuff I really want to watch, instead of letting a TV drone on in the background because I'm too lazy to get up from the couch and turn it off. I'm not paying for football because I'm not paying for cable. If you don't like football, why are you paying for it?

Poll: More concern about economy than income inequality

These data, from a Nov. 28-Dec.1 Gallup survey, show that while 46% of Americans believe it is extremely or very important that the federal government in Washington reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and poor, 70% say it is important for the government to increase equality of opportunity, and 82% say it is important for the government to grow and expand the economy.

via gallup.com

I'm not so sure the weak economy and income inequality are discrete issues, myself, but to the extent they are this is probably the right set of priorities. You fight over your share of pie when you actually have a pie to split.

I don't think America is as worried about income inequality as I am

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans are now less likely to see U.S. society as divided into the "haves" and "have nots" than they were in 2008, returning to their views prior to that point. A clear majority, 58%, say they do not think of America in this way, after Americans were divided 49% to 49% in the summer of 2008.

via gallup.com

Read the whole thing. Pretty interesting.

Now I'm an anti-car-fatality bigot

Just kidding. After a week of more-than-expected heat over our column on Tim Tebow, Ben and I have finally produced another column for Scripps Howard News Service. It's about the National Transportation Safety Board's recommendation to ban cell phone use by drivers. Ben thinks it's nanny-statism run amok. I differ:

Sometimes the "live free or die" crowd takes its motto a little too seriously. When it comes to driving and cellphone use, though, that motto accurately sums up the choices.

Should drivers be free to kill two people and injure 38 others? That's what happened in Missouri in August 2010, when a pickup truck rear-ended a big rig, which slammed into a school bus, which rammed another school bus. The NTSB's investigation showed the pickup driver had sent 11 messages in the 11 minutes leading to the accident -- the last message coming "moments" before the tragedy.

Should a tractor-trailer driver be free to kill 11 other people? That happened the same year in Kentucky, where a cell phone-using driver crossed the center lane and slammed into a 15-passenger van.

Should bus drivers be free to be careless with their passengers? In 2004, such a driver was too busy talking on his phone to avoid slamming into the underside of a Virginia stone bridge -- injuring 11 of the 27 high school students on board.

Anti-nanny-state conservatives will argue such tragedies don't justify federal intrusion into state laws. But the NTSB's recommendation is just that -- right now, there is no federal requirement that states ban drivers from cellphone use. And many federal, state and even local roads are built using federal tax dollars. The emergency personnel and police that respond to disastrous events are paid for from your pocket. The NTSB isn't overstepping its proper bounds, nor are governments that adopt its recommendations.

Distracted drivers are deadly menaces that consume public resources.

There are reasons to worry about a rampant nanny state run amok. The NTSB's recommendation isn't even close to the top of the list. In this case, Americans don't have to choose: Live free. Don't die.