Spring Break , News Highlights, Dating Quesions

So,
I'm in the realm of the trivial this morning. For the rest of the week, since I'll be going to movies almost daily, and perhaps chatting with some random people that I meet in the process, I'll be posting about the movies I see at the Tribeca Film Festival, and anything else remotely interesting that I come across. If you're reading this blog, and you happen to be going, perhaps we'll meet in line outside "El Perro Negro: Stories of the Spanish Civil War" tomorrow evening. Wouldn't that be just great?
Oh yeah, did you all know that I have a site tracker? I was really excited to see that I had so many readers, and that I can even figure out where they were reading from: lots of CUNY faculty out there reading away, I see, and My Mom and Step-Dad, and my old roomie. There are even a few strangers who read this - directed, whaddya know, to me, by google. However, when I looked at the site-tracker DailyKos, I developed a major inferiority complex.

Other news....My room-mate hunt was over, but now it's started again. The opinion of Joe, who's been renovating the screened-in porch is that her boyfriend disapproved of the landlord's extroversion. Whatever the reason, I got a call last night that instead of moving in, my roomie-to-be was leaving me in the lurch. Thanks. I once swore off people in their twenties, and I should have followed that rule this time. I was just thinking that I should bring the same criteria to dating that I do for room-mates, because I've tended to be somewhat more careful in that regard.
Do you think that's too extreme, though, wondering to yourself on the first date, "hmm, could I live with this person?" Should I ask him whether he does his dishes right after eating or leaves them in the sink?" Should I ask about chore sharing?
I'm always begging for your input, readers, so let me do it again. Do you have a first date check list? What would turn you off/on on first meeting? What do house-keeping traits suggest about people's personalities, if anything?
Real News: Rahul Mahajan, can I be your number one fan? Once again, he has an interesting comment, this time about how the Iraqi resistance has created space for Venezuela's president to institute a tax of 50% on private oil firms in order to fund social programs. Here's the most interesting thing I saw on the DailyKos.Here's a smart commentary on the mediocrity of much of the world's leadership by Robert Fisk from April 16th.
Oh yeah, and here's an interesting set of book commentaries from a guy named David Hernandez who I found while looking for a link to "roommates and stories." He is a cheerful fellow, it seems to me, and refers to Brett Easton Ellis as "that guy who wrote American Psycho" and also as a "dullard." Actually, I liked American Psycho, though I hadn't expected to. Read it years ago, and have had a long-standing plan to write an article about it and Briggite Jones' Diary as creating characters exemplary of (post?)-modern identity's overdetermination by commodities and advertizing.