Can a geek also be a player? A quick scan of the recent coverage surrounding Peter Orszag’s mini-scandal, the answer is “yes”. Orszag is director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. He also dates assorted hot women, fathers children with them, breaks up with them, and then gets engaged to a different but equally hot woman.  Join Stewart breaks it down for us:

Who knew that bureaucrats could be such ladykillers? Clearly, I’m not living up to my potential. Maybe a new pair of glasses and a haircut that can slice glass would improve my chances.

The health care bill continues its slow march towards final passage as House and Senate Democrats work on negotiating a compromise bill. But even now, with the finish line so tantalizingly close, a special election in Massachusetts (of all places) could throw a monkey wrench in the whole works. Next Tuesday, Massachusetts voters will elect a senator to fill Edward Kennedy’s seat. Of course, Massachusetts is as blue as a naked Na’vi taking a quick dip in Lake Superior, but the political climate is such that even Massachusetts Democratic candidate Martha Coakley is facing a tough crowd. Polls are all over the place and it’s conceivable that the Republican candidate could win, thus taking away the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority.

In such a scenario, the House could still pass the Senate version of the bill and be done with the process. But that solution is far from ideal. The Senate bill could stand a lot of improving and that can only happen if the House and Senate negotiate.

This was never going to be easy. I’m reasonably confident Coakley will win, but much is at stake and it would be a horrible shame if Kennedy’s successor killed his dream of making health care more accessible and affordable.

The Times is the king of fun and interesting infographics that use web technologies to great effect. The latest example is a comparison of Netflix rental patterns across metropolitan areas including the Twin Cities. The maps reveal interesting demographic divides in terms of taste in movies. For example, Paul Blart: Mall Cop was huge in the exurbs but was completely ignored in the urban core. Rachel Getting Married did pretty well in Minneapolis-St. Paul but got less love in the suburbs. Somewhat surprisingly, biopic Milk was pretty popular across the entire metropolitan region except for the far northern and southern fringes. And everyone wanted to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Your assignment for the weekend: download Uptime and Downtime, The Kleptones’ latest two latest collections of mashups. I’ve been a fan of The Kleptones’ sonic alchemy ever since A Night at the Hip-Hopera and their latest offerings contain some surprising combinations that somehow work. Like Aretha Franklin and Metallica, Genesis and M.I.A., and Nirvana and Blur. Some may still argue that mashups are nothing more than novelties, but I find the best ones to be elegant deconstructions of disparate musical styles.

The big Consumer Electronics Show gets underway tomorrow and the likes of Sony and Toshiba are hard at work trying to convince me that my brand new LCD TV is already an aging relic and that the future of home entertainment is 3-D. I remain unpersuaded. I’m still trying to decide if I can distinguish between the image quality of a Blu-Ray disc versus a standard DVD, so it’s probably premature for electronics manufacturers to convince me that I need to put on a pair of silly-looking glasses to watch an episode of Lost (or whatever the next geek soap is). I’m sure the effect is cool, but childhood memories of those flimsy cardboard red-and-blue 3-D glasses and their disappointing results have made me instinctively suspicious of any claims regarding 3-D’s awesome factor. And no, I haven’t yet seen Avatar in 3-D, so I might still be converted into a true believer. Even so, I’m quite happy with the old-school world of 2-D entertainment.

However, I desperately want Apple’s tablet computer even though I’m not totally sure what it does, how it works, or whether it even exists. My resistance to the hype machine is somewhat hit-and-miss.