Read it. Watch it. Buy it.

Read it: I am an avid Diana Gabaldon fan. Maybe even rabid. I started reading Gabaldon's Outlander series when my husband and I first moved to Germany. In a foreign country, barely knowing anyone, and without a job I stumbled into the only bookstore in town with a significant English language section and picked out the fattest books in the whole place - something that would really fill up my time. Not only did Gabaldon's Outlander books fill up the time, but there were also fabulously written, obsessively researched, and beautifully plotted - a trifecta that you just don't find that often in "popular" novels. With a healthy dose of science fiction, a smidgen of romance and a heaping helping of historical fiction Gabaldon's novels are hard to appropriately categorize. In bookstores I've seen them in both the romance and the science fiction sections but don't let these labels turn you off. I promise you that if you crack the first book, you'll want to work through them all. Which will leave you in the position I find myself in currently: waiting impatiently for the next book to come out in late 2009. And then I won't be so cranky all by myself.

Watch it: The MPAA ratings board is not something that often crosses my mind, or at least it hasn't since I turned 17 and didn't have to worry about whether or not I could get into the theatre to see an R-rated movie any more. The excellent - and more than a little disturbing - documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated changed all that. The most shocking part of this documentary for me was the horrifying realization that, in the MPAA ratings board, the American public unwittingly condones the kind of censorship of films that would be considered tantamount to book burning if the medium were written word. The MPAA, an agency with absolute power over ratings decisions - and thus near absolute power over a film's marketing and distribution - operates in almost total secrecy, apparently with no set guidelines for assigning ratings, and in collusion with studios. And yet, because American parents have no other means of determining whether or not a film is suitable for children - and because this information understandably matters to them - the MPAA's particular brand of censorship, heavily weighted against sexual scenes and nearly indifferent to violence, is thriving.

Buy it: After never owning a game system until well into my twenties, my husband I went all in with the Wii, and we've loved it. With so many games that we can play cooperatively as a couple, the Wii has given us another activity to enjoy together. Our favorite new game? Guitar Hero: World Tour. There's not a lot to say about Guitar Hero that hasn't already be said. Yes, it makes you feel like a rock god. Yes, you look absolutely ridiculous playing plastic instruments while obviously laboring under the delusion that you're a rock God. No, you don't particularly care. Why? Because you are a rock god, and as such are above such petty human concerns. The bottom line: it really is just that fun.