I found a hilarious montage on the internet the other day, courtesy of Topless Robot’s Twitter feed, and chuckled, copy and pasted it into the body of an e-mail, and forwarded it to some of my coworkers.

One of the coworkers in question is a lovely woman, about my age, from Slovakia. She recently returned to the Office after spending the summer in Europe (as a matter of fact, she’d been refused leave, so she’d quit, and the CEO told her she could come back whenever she wanted), and I’m going to blame her absence on the fact that I forgot she and I don’t share the same pop culture references.

Like, whereas I looked at the photo and just kind of, “Oh my god! Vader is going to use his son’s severed hand to masturbate with!”, she looked at the photo and said “WTF.”

Explaining that photo? Not fun. Or comfortable.

Even though I’ve been back in DC for well over a year, I still haven’t made a trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl (even though it’s been endorsed by Obama). I need to do that, soon, too. Sadly, the eponymous restaurant’s owner and founder passed away last night:

He passed away peaceably last night in his home, according to family members.

His daughter-in-law, Sonya, is holding down the fort at the restaurant today as other family members gather to make funeral plans.

Ali turned 82-years-old in June. Family members say he had some health issues over the years, but they don’t have a clear idea of what caused his death right now.

Ali had just come back from a trip with his wife, and family members say he wasn’t feeling right. He had some tests done, but he had come home from the hospital and was at home when he passed away.

Should I feel guilty that I did a mental cheer when I read an article about the decline of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol?

After strong starts and huge marketing campaigns, some of the biggest books of the fall season — on which the struggling bookselling industry has pinned much of its hopes — are losing a little steam.

“The Lost Symbol,” Dan Brown’s highly anticipated follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” broke sales records on its first day and in its first week of release last month, selling nearly two million copies in the United States, Canada and Britain, according to the publisher. But according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales in the United States, the number of copies the book sold last week fell by 47 percent, to 214,000 from 401,000.

And over all, according to BookScan, book sales were down about 4 percent compared with the same week last year, suggesting that neither of those titles or any of the other big fall books from heavyweights like Mitch Albom, Pat Conroy, E. L. Doctorow and Audrey Niffenegger were helping booksellers to overcome the sludgy economy.

Other big titles showed mixed results. “Her Fearful Symmetry,” the second novel by Ms. Niffenegger, author of the best-selling “Time Traveler’s Wife,” sold just 23,000 copies in its first week, according to BookScan. Publishing insiders suggested that was a disappointment given that Scribner, the unit of Simon & Schuster that published the book, paid Ms. Niffenegger close to $5 million for it.

“We all expect miracles, and some miracles take a little while,” said Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner.

It is in fact true that I buy more hardcover books now than I used to, but a large reason for that is that, y’know, I have a pretty decent employee discount at the Bookstore. Her Fearful Symmetry? Fourteen bucks or so.

And let me tell you — I am dying dying — to read that book. I picked up a copy on Sunday (according to our in-house search/history database, I was the first person to buy a copy), and I would be halfway through it right now if The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest hadn’t arrived when it did.

If you’re one of the fans of Stieg Larsson’s mystery series, which began with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and continued with the release this last spring of The Girl Who Played With Fire, boy have I got a reason for you to hate me. You know how the third book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest won’t be released until next spring?

Yeah, but it was published in the United Kingdom October 1st. And my copy arrived the other day via Royal Mail.

I’m seventy pages into it, and so far? It’s pretty damn good.

Amazon.co.uk for the win.