In my cover article for this week’s Phoenix, I explore the world’s imperiled oceans. It was a sobering story to report — learning that 100 million sharks are killed every year, or the that the seafloor is stripped of pounds of aquatic life, thrown back as waste, all in the interest of harvesting barely two thirds of a shrimp cocktail.

A comment on a colleague's MyFace page jumped out at me recently. The discussion was about John Hillcoat's upcoming (November 25) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's end-of-the-world-with-cannibals-versus-family-values novel "The Road." One of the participants in the thread said, "If you don't include the baby on the spit what's the point of making the movie?"

The most entertaining theater in this grand health care showdown has been that in which physicians play the victim. Look at homeboy right here; don't you just feel awful about the potential impact of "Obamacare"? Make you want to donate five cents a day so Dr. Dickstain can move from the bay side to the ocean?

Fletcher from the Sandbox on WFNX passes along this bit of news: Kelly's Roast Beef is opening in Allston.

The 58-year-old restaurant chain that takes credit for inventing the roast beef sandwich plans to revamp the former Marty’s Liquor store in Allston into its first Hub location. The 140-seat eatery will be the sixth for the Saugus chain that’s been named the 2009 Restaurant of the Year by the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.

Is this the most casual self-outing by a gay Republican in the history of politics or what?

It will be interesting to see how the GOP base in the state reacts. If Charlie Baker does pick Tisei as his LG, it's possible that someone could run against him on an anti-gay platform -- and potentially beat Tisei in the GOP primary. That would be a disaster for Baker, and the state party generally.

We're proud to say that former Phoenix intern Sam MacLaughlin (bro to former Web Managing Editor and scribe Nina) is featured in this Daily Show clip about the mad rush slow crawl to buy Sarah Palin's new book ("So you've come in character as everything that's wrong with America!"). He's the bookish lad around the 2:45 mark: "One more than seven!"

As we just got through saying, we are firmly in year-end list season. And since it's 2009, we're also in decade-end list season (vote here! You're telling me you don't have an opinion on the Knife vs. LCD Soundsystem? Or In Rainbows vs. Veckatimest?). And all that's fine. It's kind of fun, even, sometimes.

Hey, here's some news to crack a few smiles in the governor's office: the Massachusetts unemployment rate dropped from 9.3% to 8.7% in October -- the first monthly decline in 28 months.

Total net job losses for the month were under 1000. Construction jobs eked positive for the first time since February -- perhaps a sign of federal stimulus money at work.

This week's Bay Windows makes the case that the death of the Washington Blade--part of the broader demise of GLBT publishing behemoth Window Media and Unite Media--is primarily about one particular corporate culture. Co-publishers Jeff Coakley and Sue O'Connell have a vested interest here, since their own publication (which, I should note, is printed by the Phoenix Media/Communications Group*) recently competed with Window/Unite's IN Newsweekly.

You may already be getting sick of reading the obligatory Top Albums of the Decade list that every music editor, blogger, and social networker has been ordered to shove down your throat. Pitchfork's got 200. Paste's got 50, and so does NPR.

If these lists have anything in common, it's that they leave us wanting to throw in our own two cents.

In this week's issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I write about some of the ways the Democratic candidates for US Senate are trying to get attention and position.

I start with a look at how Congressman Michael Capuano is trying to use prominent female endorsers to signal to women that they needn't feel obligated to vote for Attorney General Martha Coakley.

I was watching the Patriot's game last Sunday, the culmination of an already lousy weekend [see previous post], and was diverted by some of the commercials. One was for "Avatar," the much-hyped, upcoming James Cameron movie, and I thought, "Wow, that looks like a really fancy video game." Then there was a commercial for the video game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2," and I thought, "Wow, that looks like it would be make a better movie than ‘Avatar.

It's hard to believe it was only a year ago that unfortunate riders on the Green Line had nothing to look forward to but a cramped, jerky evening commute. Now we have a new mascot to make our day just that much brighter: a chubby, bushy-tailed furball by the name of Kenmore Kat. Take that, Red Liners!

For awhile, it seemed like the tale of the domestic cat living in Kenmore station was purely apocryphal, and Kenmore Kat was the type of legend only occasionally spotted by your friend's boyfriend's cousin's barista.

Cory Doctorow opens his mouth, and nerdgasms fall out: at any given moment, he's liable to be spouting off about feral robot dogs, space domes over Disney World, or building a haunted hotel modeled after a Quake level ("I'll open-source this idea," says he). And we'd expect nothing less -- after all, he's one of the superclocking brains behind BoingBoing, that exalted bestiary of sweet-ass geekdom.

The state legislature calls it quits for the year today, and here are the recent developments, according to reports from the State House News Service:

--Speaker Bob DeLeo is indicating that he will not try to rush through the education bill that the Senate passed Tuesday, which is a major priority of the Patrick administration.

When Cave In signed off at the tail end of 2006, we feared one of Boston’s greatest post-metal bands had perished before its prime. So when a couple of years later they snuck back into the studio and then unveiled a blistering new EP with a one-off show at Great Scott, we grabbed our cameras — just in case it turned out to be a last hurrah.

Though I missed the real show -- which was this morning between 3:30 and 5:30 am (but in reality even if I had known there's no way in HELLZ I would be awake that early) -- it is still possible to catch the spectacular Leonid meteor shower tonight/early tomorrow morning.

The Leonid meteor shower, called so because it happens around and near the constellation Leo, is leftovers from the comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle that scattered space dust around the year 1533.

In the previous post, I told you about my exchange with an academic at UCLA who studied candidate attractiveness. Well, it turns out that when you mention Massachusetts to people who study candidate attractiveness, their minds turn to one thing: the beautiful man with the perfect hair, Mitt Romney himself.

Although the study did not include gubernatorial candidates, Romney was entered into the database by virtue of his 1994 campaign for Senate.